Watchdog

Russia saw its biggest loss of democracy in a decade last year, while it and other authoritarian states took aggressive action to block efforts to form new democracies elsewhere in Europe and Eurasia, a new report by Freedom House finds.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's moves to annex Crimea and back separatists in eastern Ukraine waging civil war against Kyiv had a cascading effect of stifling democracy at home and snuffing out freedom and democratic achievements in neighboring regimes, said the U.S.-based watchdog group in its annual Nations In Transit report, which monitors the democratic development of 29 nations from the former Soviet Union, Balkans, and Central Europe.

"Russia has been at the center of Freedom House’s narrative, as regards Eurasia, for a number of years," the report's author, Sylvana Habdank-Kolaczkowska, told RFE/RL, but last year Russia's disruptive influence grew exponentially because of the "escalation of Russia’s aggression internationally and the new forms that it took.”

The fallout from Russia's crackdown on democracy and freedom was felt both at home and abroad.

"As it sought to destabilize the new democratic government in Ukraine, the Kremlin stepped up its suppression of dissent at home -- targeting online media, opposition figures, and civil society groups with legal bans on extremism, trumped up criminal charges, and other restrictions," Habdank-Kolaczkowska said.

Putin's struggle for survival in the face of an economic embargo by the West, combined with his efforts to justify his actions in Ukraine, led to a dubious achievement, she said: "The birth of a new kind of Russian propaganda -- with Russian state-controlled media broadly disseminating misinformation, targeting mostly countries that have large Russian-speaking minorities."

This new media-propagated propaganda tool has, along with Russia's nearby military exercises, been making the Russian-speaking peoples of other Eurasian countries feel "extremely insecure," inhibiting democratic efforts in those countries, she said.

Despite Russia's attempts to intervene in Ukraine and the collapse of its own democracy rating, Ukraine managed to spur a big jump of four notches in its rating, thanks to the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt presidency and two rounds of well-administered, competitive elections, the report found.

While Russia won special attention in the report this year, it also singles out Azerbaijan and Ilham Aliyev's regime for a "new intensity" to its multiyear crackdown on activists and journalists who threatened to expose official corruption and other abuses.

Many regime opponents were jailed during the year on fabricated charges like hooliganism or possession of weapons and drugs. And all that happened at a time when Azerbaijan was being honored by European leaders with hosting the 2015 European Games and chairing the executive body of the Council of Europe.

In light of these developments, Habdank-Kolaczkowska said, Azerbaijan’s rating slide has gotten so bad that now that "it actually has a worse ranking than Russia, Tajikistan, or Belarus.”

The growing "audacity of democracy's foes" also was a factor in Hungary, which under the right-wing rule of Viktor Orbán drove a decline in democracy throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the report found. Hungary was demoted from a “consolidated democracy” to a “semiconsolidated” one.

In the Balkans, with journalists in a precarious situation and judicial reforms stalling, four out of seven countries registered declines.

In general, the trend was negative throughout the whole Eurasian region, the report found.

Twenty years ago, when Freedom House first started rating countries, only three -- Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan -- were considered “consolidated authoritarian regimes.”

That number has more than doubled since then, however, and Eurasia’s average democracy score has fallen from 5.4 to 6.03 on a 7-point scale, the report found.

Rulings in two cases by the European Court of Human Rights this week have achieved the seemingly impossible -- making civilian victims on both sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict feel satisfied that justice has been carried out.

Both cases were filed a decade ago by civilians who were displaced from their homes by fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenian forces during the early 1990s in districts adjacent to Azerbaijan's breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Together, the cases establish that both Baku and Yerevan have denied displaced civilians their property rights, respect to private life, and the right to an effective remedy.

The June 16 rulings are the court's first related to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and are expected to influence more than 1,000 similar cases filed at the European court by displaced Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the area.

Fakhraddin Pashayev was one of six Azerbaijani Kurds who jointly filed a complaint after being displaced from their homes during the early 1990s in Azerbaijan's district of Lachin -- a strip of land less than 10 kilometers wide between Armenia's border and Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Pashayev told RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service that, even though it took 10 years of legal battles to receive the ruling, "we are happy with the decision of the court."

Pashayev said the court battle was a "long process," noting that one of the other five plaintiffs in his suit died before the ruling.

He said the group "believed in Europe's justice from the very start." But still, he said, he cannot imagine ever being able to travel back home to the Lachin region, which has been under the control of Armenian military forces for more than 20 years.

Never Allowed Home

The other case was lodged at the European court in 2006 by Minas Sarkisian, a displaced ethnic Armenian from the village of Gulistan in Azerbaijan's Shahumyan district who died in 2009 at the age of 80 without ever being allowed to return to his home there.

Sarkisian's house and 2,000 square meters of farmland lies on the river that has served as a volatile front line between Azerbaijani and Armenian military forces since a 1994 cease-fire deal was brokered in the frozen conflict by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

After Sarkisian's death, the court case was continued by his son, Vladimir Sarkisian, who has been living with his family in the town of Yeghvard near Yerevan ever since they fled an advance into Gulistan by Azerbaijani military forces in 1992.

Sarkisian, now in his late 50s, told RFE/RL's Armenian Service that the financial compensation the European court ordered Azerbaijan's government to pay is not the most important aspect of the June 16 ruling.

"What is important is that we have won the case," he said. "I don't know how things will be in the future. But this process is praiseworthy. I don't want anyone to experience what we did."

In Sarkisian's case against Azerbaijan, the European court noted that it was the first time it had had to decide on a complaint against "a state which had lost control over part of its territory in a war and occupation, but which at the same time was alleged to be responsible for refusing a displaced person access to property in an area remaining under its control."

Before the war, the Shahumyan district was predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians.

But, in September 1991, shortly after Azerbaijan declared its independence from the Soviet Union, ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh claimed that the Shahumyan district also was part of their self-declared republic.

As the crisis escalated into war, a military assault into the Shahumyan region by Azerbaijani forces forced Sarkisian's family and other ethnic Armenians to flee.

Sarkisian told RFE/RL that he watched his village be destroyed by Azerbaijani rockets and direct fire from tanks. He says nothing remains intact in Gulistan today.

Compensation

The European court rejected Azerbaijan's argument that Sarkisian and other ethnic Armenian civilians were being prevented from returning to the region solely out of concern for their safety.

It said Azerbaijan was obliged to compensate ethnic Armenians who were displaced from territory under its control and to create easily accessible property claims mechanisms for all displaced civilians in a similar situation.

In Pashayev's case, the European court rejected Armenia's claim that it was only ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and volunteers -- not Armenian government forces -- who took part in the conflict.

The court said numerous reports and public statements, including from members and former members of the Armenian government, demonstrated that Armenia was significantly involved in the conflict from an early date through its military presence and by providing military equipment and expertise to Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian separatists.

It said Armenia effectively exercises control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories -- ruling that Armenia and the separatists were highly integrated in virtually all important matters.

It said the separatist leaders in the breakaway region have survived by virtue of Yerevan's military, political, financial, and other support.

The European court also said Armenia's government must create easily accessible property-claims mechanisms for displaced civilians in order to restore their property rights and obtain compensation.

In both cases, the European court said the obligation of Baku and Yerevan to compensate displaced civilians and create property claims mechanisms was not lifted by the fact that OSCE-brokered peace negotiations are continuing -- including talks on the issue of property claims and compensation.

With reporting by RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz, RFE/RL's Armenian Service correspondent Sargis Harutyunyan, and RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service