Only 3% enjoy open society, says Civic Atlas report

A truly open society exists for merely 3% of the world's population, according to a new "Atlas of Civil Society" published in Germany. In 38 countries, 3 billion live in fear of repression, surveillance and even murder.

Nations that enable and safeguard citizens' freedoms are becoming rarer, according to the five-category atlas compiled by CIVICUS, a Johannesburg-based global alliance, forBread for the World (Brot für die Welt), a large aid agency of Germany's protestant churches.

"Women are disproportionately often the targets of digital, psychological and indeed physical violence, right the way through to politically-motivated murder," the president of Brot für die Welt in Germany, Cornelia Füllkrung-Weitzel, said, as the study focused in particular on women this year.

Read more: Nation states — have they served their purpose?

CIVICUS researchers, using 2019 data, sorted 196 nations into five categories — open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.

Top group eroded

The top 43 nations, comprising 259 million persons, accounted for just 3% of the world's 7.7-billion population — down from 4% in the previous assessment based on 2018 data.

Remaining in the top "open" group are 13 EU members — including Germany, but only around half of the bloc, plus the departing United Kingdom — along with New Zealand, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Slovenia as well as a string of island nations.

Read more: Australia's newspapers go dark

Australia and Malta fall out of the "open" category into the second-placed "narrowed" category of 42 nations, placing them alongside 13 other EU nations, including Italy and France, as well as the United States and Japan.

Hungary among 'obstructed' category

Forty-nine countries were placed in the "obstructed" group, including Brazil, Malawi and Hungary.

Categorized as "repressed" societies were 38 nations with a combined population of 3 billion — almost 40% of the world's population, Nigeria and India were included, where residents fear intimidation, surveillance and even death, if they criticize those in power.

In the worst group where freedoms are deemed "closed" to 2 billion people, there stood 24 countries, including Egypt, China, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Their rulers escape prosecution; their critics are jailed, mistreated and killed, write the CIVICUS authors.

Defined by Bergson, Popper

The term "open society" was coined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1932 — during the onset of the Nazi German dictatorship.

The concept was developed further by Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper during his World War Two-exile in Christchurch, New Zealand.

ipj/msh (epd, KNA, dpa)

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