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Democratic Backsliding By Country
Democratic backsliding, also known as autocratization, is the decline in democratic qualities of a political regime. Former Eastern bloc Czech Republic The coinciding tenure from 2017 to 2021 of ANO 2011 leader Andrej Babiš and his ally, President Miloš Zeman, has been described by analysts Sean Hanley and Milada Anna Vachudova as a period of democratic backsliding, albeit to a less drastic degree than Poland or Hungary. However, other academics such as Elisabeth Bakke and Nick Sitter have disputed this, describing it as "conceptual stretching" and claiming that "exceptional factors" that existed in Hungary and Poland are not applicable to the Czech Republic. Georgia Georgia's governing party, Georgian Dream (GD), was accused of democratic backsliding in a 2019 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for failing to approve more representative electoral reform proposals. U.S. Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen accused Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia o ...
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Democratic Backsliding
Democratic backsliding, also called autocratization, is the decline in the democratic characteristics of a political system, and is the opposite of democratization. Democracy is the most popular form of government, with more than half of the nations in the world being democracies according to a study examining 165 countries determined that 98 of them were democracies in 2020. Since the 2010s, the world has grown more authoritarian, with one quarter of the world's population under democratically backsliding hybrid regimes into the 2020s.The Global State of Democracy 2021
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
Proposed causes of democratic backsliding include lack of public support for democracy,



Tünde Handó
Tünde Handó (born 1 May 1962) is a Hungarian jurist and judge, who served as the inaugural President of the OBH (National Judiciary Office) from 1 January 2012 to 30 November 2019. On 1 January 2020, she replaced István Stumpf as a member of the Constitutional Court of Hungary. Early career Handó graduated from the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University Eötvös Loránd University ( hu, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, ELTE) is a Hungarian public research university based in Budapest. Founded in 1635, ELTE is one of the largest and most prestigious public higher education institutions in Hung ... in 1986. She had been a member of the Bibó István College from 1983 to 1986. She married József Szájer – vice-president of Fidesz and Member of the European Parliament – in 1983. Their child Fanni was born in 1987. Handó was a court drafter in the Metropolitan Labor Court, before becoming a court secretary. She was appointed judge on 1 May 1991 and Presiden ...
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Pegasus (spyware)
Pegasus is spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most versions of iOS and Android. Pegasus is able to exploit iOS versions up to 14.7, through a zero-click exploit. As of 2022, Pegasus was capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps. The spyware is named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. It is a Trojan horse computer virus that can be sent "flying through the air" to infect cell phones. Pegasus was discovered in August 2016 after a failed installation attempt on the iPhone of a human rights activist led to an investigation revealing details about the spyware, its abilities, as well as the security vulnerabilities it exploited. News of the spyware caused significant media coverage. It was called the "most sophisticated" ...
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NSO Group
NSO Group Technologies (NSO standing for Niv, Shalev and Omri, the names of the company's founders) is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones. It employed almost 500 people as of 2017. NSO claims that it provides authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime. The company says that it deals with government clients only. ''Pegasus'' spyware is classified as a weapon by Israel and any export of the technology must be approved by the government. According to several reports, NSO Group spyware has been used to target human rights activists and journalists in various countries, was used for state espionage against Pakistan, for warrantless domestic surveillance of Israeli citizens by Israeli police, and played a role in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government. In 2019, instant messaging company W ...
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Pegasus Project (investigation)
The Pegasus Project is an international investigative journalism initiative that revealed governments' espionage on journalists, opposition politicians, activists, business people and others using the private Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli technology and cyber-arms company NSO Group. Pegasus is ostensibly marketed for surveillance of "serious crimes and terrorism". In 2020, a target list of 50,000 phone numbers leaked to Forbidden Stories, and an analysis revealed the list contained the numbers of leading opposition politicians, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and other political dissidents. A small number of phones that were inspected by Amnesty International's cybersecurity team revealed forensic evidence of the Pegasus spyware, a zero-click Trojan virus developed by NSO Group. This malware provides the attacker full access to the targeted smartphone, its data, images, photographs and conversations as well as camera, microphone and geolocation. This in ...
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Section 28
Section 28 or Clause 28While going through Parliament, the amendment was constantly relabelled with a variety of clause numbers as other amendments were added to or deleted from the Bill, but by the final version of the Bill, which received Royal Assent, it had become Section 28. Section 28 is sometimes referred to as Clause 28 – in the United Kingdom, Acts of Parliament have sections, whereas in a Bill (which is put before Parliament to pass) those sections are called clauses. was a legislative designation for a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to pe ..." by Local government in the United Kingdom, local authorities. Introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Third Thatcher ministry, Conservative g ...
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LGBT Rights In Hungary
LGBT people in Hungary face legal and social challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Homosexuality is legal in Hungary for both men and women. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex is banned in the country. However, households headed by same-sex couples are not eligible for all of the same legal rights available to heterosexual married couples. Registered partnership for same-sex couples was legalised in 2009, but same-sex marriage remains banned. The Hungarian government has passed legislation that restricts the civil rights of LGBT Hungarians – such as ending legal recognition of transgender Hungarians and banning LGBT content and displays for minors. This trend continues under the Fidesz government of Viktor Orbán. In June 2021, Hungary passed an anti-LGBT law on banning "homosexual and transexual propaganda" effective since July 1. The law has been condemned by seventeen EU countries so far. Also, in July 2021, the EU Commission has started l ...
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Journal Of Democracy
The ''Journal of Democracy'' is a quarterly academic journal established in 1990 and an official publication of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Forum for Democratic Studies. It covers the study of democracy, democratic regimes, and pro-democracy movements throughout the world. In addition to scholarly research and analysis, the journal incorporates reports from activists on the ground, updates on elections, and reviews of recent literature in the field. Writers published in the journal have included Václav Havel, the Dalai Lama, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The journal is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The editors of the ''Journal of Democracy'' commission most articles but do consider unsolicited articles. The journal does not perform peer review. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). ...
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Hybrid Regime
A hybrid regime is a mixed type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one (or vice versa). Hybrid regimes are categorized as combine autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest they maybe relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War. The term ''hybrid regime'' arises from a polymorphic view of political regimes that opposes the dichotomy of autocracy or democracy. Modern scholarly analysis of hybrid regimes focuses attention on the decorative nature of democratic institutions (elections do not lead to a change of power, different media broadcast government point of view and the opposition ...
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University Of Gothenburg
The University of Gothenburg ( sv, Göteborgs universitet) is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg. Founded in 1891, the university is the third-oldest of the current Swedish universities and with 37,000 students and 6000 staff members it is one of the largest universities in the Nordic countries. About With its eight faculties and 38 departments, the University of Gothenburg is one of the most wide-ranging and versatile universities in Sweden. Its eight faculties offer training in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Humanities, Education, Information Technology, Business, Economics and Law, and Health Sciences. The University of Gothenburg has the highest number of applicants per study place in many of its subjects and courses, making it one of the most popular universities in Sweden. History The University of Gothenburg was founded as ''Göteborgs högskola'' (Gothenburg University College) in 1891. In 1907 it was granted the same ...
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Hungarian Helsinki Committee
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) is a non-governmental human rights organization founded in 1989 and based in Budapest, Hungary. The HHC is a member of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. The HHC defines itself as monitoring the respect for human rights protected by international human rights instruments, to inform the public about human rights violations and to provide victims of human rights abuse with free legal assistance. It is also linked with the OMCT and is a member organisation of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE). The Hungarian Helsinki Committee is also active in the rights of asylum seeker An asylum seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country and applies for asylum (i.e., international protection) in that other country. An asylum seeker is an immigrant who has been forcibly displaced and m ...s, condition of people detained, the state ...
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