The recent problems in Egypt surprised me. I had never regarded it as particularly oppressive compared with other Arab countries. Libya, Syria, Iraq under Saddam, and Saudi Arabia are countries that I would have named first for human rights violations and oppression.
Is there a list or ranking of countries that human rights organizations consider extremely oppressive to their people?
I’m curious to see how the various Arab countries compare with China, Russia and some of the African countries.
Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report might be a good bet.
In the Middle East, Israel is the only “Free” one, while Kuwait, Lebanon, and Morocco are “Partly Free.” Turkey is also in the Europe section, and “Partly Free.”
China and Russia are not free.
I think Amnesty International might do that.
As far as I know, AI doesn’t actually rank human rights abuses.
What is encompassed by the terms “human rights” is rather broad and open to interpretation. Various organizations that focus on specific issues do have rankings. Reports Without Borders ranks press freedom and journalists’ safety, Freedom House (which has already been mentioned) does some rankings, Transparency International ranks corruption and lots of other things besides. So it depends on exactly what you’re looking for.
I was primarily thinking about the average persons chances of getting arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. For example, someone overheard criticizing the head of state or government.
I know there’s outright genocide in some African countries. I’m not even sure there is a real government in some of those areas.
No, they don’t.
They do have reports on the state of individual countries, but no ranking or comparisons.
Specifically to avoid comparisons or justifications like “Well, my country arrests & tortures some protestors, but nowhere near as many as country X”. AI’s position is that any political arrest, imprisonment, or torture is a criminal violation of human rights, and there is no point in ranking them or deciding which is ‘worse’.
But only for violations of those human rights that fall into the “civil and political” category, not the “economic, social and cultural” category.
Freedom House is probably the best known source out there on this subject, but Human Rights Watch also has reports Reports | Human Rights Watch, and the US State Department also puts out a human rights report that might have some useful information. Not surprisingly, there have been charges that the reports are politicized, but I find them a good place to start:
Technical Difficulties
For African countries, there is the Ibrahim Index of African Governance. Egypt in 2010 was ninth-best of 53 countries by Ibrahim’s combination method including economic development measures, though the score for “participation and human rights” indicators was quite low.
Here is the HRW report on Egypt World Report 2011: Rights Trends in World Report 2011: Egypt
Can’t think of any place where that would get you into trouble. Being politically active and doing so could do but saying so in a restaurant? Seriously even in “oppressive and not free” countries security service are too busy to have the time or even the inclination to care what a person says in social gatherings outside of exceptional circumstances.
Freedom House if memory gets about 80% of its funding from the US Government so it is about as independent as N Korean TV, with the exception that its employees can only be fired not fried if they mess up.
State Department, ditto.
AI attempts to be fair, but has an institutional bias against governments (which on its own is healthy but they take it too far) and tends to
i) report unsubstantiated claims and use them as evidence of human rights violations
ii) Too much credence onto opposition claims
iii) Misrepresentation. They might say that “government troops killed xyz” civilians, but they may not say that the civilians were targeted accidentally and compensation was paid.
iv) repeating claims which had been assessed and found baseless.
That said they do an admirable job keeping people on their toes. It is a great accomplishment that most governments at least attempt to keep the form of a fair trial and due process and some credit must go to amnesty and other NGO’s. Furthermore they do check impunity.
I can certainly think of several examples from history where a single comment could get you in trouble, such as Stalinist USSR, or Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge. The Gulag was full of people who made comments that were twisted by the NKVD to be traitorous.
I have a Syrian friend who’s father got a visit from the secret police after one of the kids made a coment about a portrait of Assad hanging in the post office.
I saw an interview with an aid worker on BBC (sorry, don’t have a cite, other than I saw teh interview on BBC’s Axis of Evil series, where they visited all the countries in W’s axis of evil) with an aid worker who was bringing food aid into North Korea. He made the joke “why is the leader so fat, when everyone else is so skinny?” He was jailed and then kicked out of the country.
Of course, secret police can’t overhear every comment, but if they can create a climate of fear and promote neighbors informing on each other, they don’t have to.
The Great Leader is an idiot said by a ordinary dude at a dinner party. Meh! The same said by a politically active individual you are looking for an excuse to put behind bars, yeah.
Thanks everyone.
Several years ago, I recall the press reporting on some country that wanted most favored nation status for trade with the U.S. The press had a list of oppressive countries and they were comparing this one in the debate. I bet they pulled that list together using links mentioned in this thread. 
That’s the saddest part of living in those countries. Your own relatives will turn you in for subversive comments.
Some of the best data I’ve seen come from Carleton University’s Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project, in Canada; their Human Rights table is here. They combine data from a variety of sources and rank countries on a variety of scales. Their Human Rights index is based on data from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset and the Minorities at Risk dataset:
The MAR data categories are not conveniently summarized, but you can download the codebook from their website.
The composite rankings look roughly appropriate, as far as I know, and based on a quick look. But I notice they apparently didn’t bother to enter any indicators at all for democracy in Palau and Micronesia (they are) and left them with a default 9.00 (worst possible) for Democratic Participation. So I have to wonder if components may be have been omitted for some countries in other measures, and figures calculated using default extreme values rather than nulls.
Huh?