The Russian military may be stymied in Ukraine, but the Kremlin is winning an ideological conflict in the Caucasus. Armenia has taken steps to distance itself from Russia over the past year, but the region’s two other states, Azerbaijan and Georgia, are moving closer to Russian-style authoritarianism, according to an annual report issued by a leading rights watchdog group.
Freedom House’s annual report on the state of political freedom in 29 European and Central Asian countries, Nations in Transit 2024, calls out the ruling Georgian Dream coalition in Georgia for slamming the breaks on democratization. The report makes the striking claim that Georgia is emulating other Kremlin acolytes, Hungary and Serbia, in forging a “semi-consolidated authoritarian regime.”
“Key institutions, from the media to the courts, have gone beyond the level of politicization expected under classical definitions of hybrid regimes and are now effectively captured by ruling parties and abused for partisan or personal gain,” the report says, referring to those three states.
The report also heaps a hefty dose of criticism on Azerbaijan. In addition to sparking a refugee crisis over its reconquest of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 – something the report called a “consequence of autocracy’s expansion” – the Azerbaijani government also conducted an expansive crackdown on rights activists and independent journalists in 2023. The crackdown helped pave the way for President Ilham Aliyev to claim unqualified victory in an election in 2024 widely deemed non-democratic.
The Freedom House report indicated that the authoritarian practices of Azerbaijan’s government now approach those of the most oppressive autocracies in the region. “Russia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan's scores have dropped so far over the last 20 years that many of their scores have reached 1.00, the lowest possible,” the report said.
The report also raised concern about the Karabakh peace process. “Absent any credible deterrents imposed by the United States or the EU, there is an obvious potential for more authoritarian aggression in the Caucasus,” the report said, referring to Azerbaijan.
The Armenian government’s ability to promote rule-of-law reforms in 2023 was hampered by the Karabakh refugee crisis, in which roughly 120,000 Karabakh Armenians were cleansed from their homeland and hurriedly resettled in Armenia, according to the Freedom House report. This sudden development forced the government to focus on addressing the refugees’ humanitarian needs.
Freedom House described Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and Azerbaijan’s campaign in Karabakh as “the two most glaring examples of the disdain that today’s autocrats hold for fundamental human rights and pluralist societies.”
