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The Trump administration and its political allies frequently denounced the BLM movement and offered unqualified support to police, downplaying the extent of police violence. The president threatened to deploy active-duty military units in cities experiencing unrest, and in June a combination of federal law enforcement agents and National Guard members used chemical irritants and physical force to clear peaceful protesters from a plaza adjacent to the White House. The United States was the first country to adopt a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over 50 years ago, and the law is actively used by journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and members of the public. A 2016 reform law was designed to improve government agencies’ responsiveness to FOIA requests, and reporters and activists were able to use FOIA filings to obtain important documents on the Trump administration that congressional investigators could not access through normal oversight requests or subpoenas.
Twelve Questions for US Presidential Primary Contenders
Democracy’s advocates need to learn from the experience of 2020 and prepare for emergency responses that respect the political rights and civil liberties of all people, including the most marginalized. Multiple military figures were appointed to leading positions on the country’s COVID-19 task force, and the armed services provided essential support in developing emergency hospitals and securing medical supplies. In recent years, observers have raised concerns about the military’s growing influence over civilian governance, and its heavy involvement in the health crisis threatened to accelerate this trend.
Electoral Process
It is more goal-oriented than traditional psychotherapy, as MI counselors directly attempt to get clients to consider making behavioral change (rather than wait for them to come to conclusions themselves). Its primary purpose is to resolve ambivalence and help clients become able to make healthy choices freely. Hypnotherapy (aka guided hypnosis) can be used as a therapeutic modality to treat substance use, especially in terms of quitting smoking cigarettes (nicotine). Clinical hypnotherapists help clients turn their attention inward, accessing unconscious or subconscious material, and then make suggestions that are healthier for the individual. The process can help clients make deep, positive, and lasting changes, including ceasing addictive habits. Fitness therapy blends exercise with psychotherapy for a fun, inspiring, and effective way of treating addiction and other issues.
Valley Health Associates
Despite a vote-tabulation process that was lauded by observers as transparent and professional, Trump refused to concede defeat, and demanded a halt to the count in states where the late tally favored Biden. In the weeks after the election, Trump launched continual volleys of fraud allegations focused on pivotal states, and openly pressured election officials in those states, particularly Republicans, to make decisions that would support his claims regardless of the facts and the law. During the counting and certification process and in the period surrounding the formal Electoral College voting on December 14, state election workers reported intimidation and death threats.
Aftercare Support
Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China, and the demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy. The Trump administration in 2020 intensified its efforts to reduce the number of legal immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants entering and residing in the country. Such moves since 2017 had in many cases been hasty, uncoordinated, and underfunded, leading to implementation problems as well as conflicts with existing laws, constitutional protections, and international human rights standards. While the administration typically cited exaggerated security concerns as justification for its policies, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a new rationale and helped the administration achieve larger declines in the number of newly arriving immigrants and asylum claimants than had previously been possible. Prior to the 2020 edition, Freedom in the World assigned a country or territory two ratings—one for political rights and one for civil liberties—based on its total scores for the political rights and civil liberties questions.
What is Sober Living?
As part of a condition of the sale, the property is now under a conservation easement with the Los Angeles Conservancy. Moon persevered, though, and eventually rose through the ranks to become chief supervisor of Pittsburgh EMS. Another Freedom House paramedic, Mitchell Brown, went on to become the director of the department of public safety for Columbus, Ohio. The US homicide rate, at 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 2019, remains low by regional and historical standards, and overall crime rates have declined since the 1990s. However, murder rates reportedly rose by more than 20 percent in the first nine months of 2020, with even higher spikes in a number of large cities. The capital district, Puerto Rico, and four overseas US territories are each represented by an elected delegate in the House who can perform most legislative functions but cannot participate in floor votes.
Turnout was the highest recorded in more than a century, with roughly two-thirds of the eligible population casting a ballot. Freedomhouse Bible College is a 3 year college program, where we are teaching minds and training hearts. We believe in order to raise up people after the Heart of God, we must create an environment, and atmosphere that encourages growth in the knowledge of God, but more importantly, in knowing the Heart of God. Recreational therapy (aka therapeutic recreation) uses creative and fun activities to help with addiction recovery. Recreational therapists lead patients in entertaining and engaging activities like sports or games; art (drawing, painting, sculpture); drama, music, and dance; and/or community outings (field trips) to improve patients' physical, social, and emotional well-being. Participants commute to receive treatment such as medication management, 12 Step support, and creative arts therapy.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), faced with the danger that its authoritarian system would be blamed for covering up and thus exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, worked hard to convert the risk into an opportunity to exert influence. It provided medical supplies to countries that were hit hard by the virus, but it often portrayed sales as donations and orchestrated propaganda events with economically dependent recipient governments. Beijing sometimes sought to shift blame to the very countries it claimed to be helping, as when Chinese state media suggested that the coronavirus had actually originated in Italy. Throughout the year, the CCP touted its own authoritarian methods for controlling the contagion, comparing them favorably with democracies like the United States while studiously ignoring the countries that succeeded without resorting to major abuses, most notably Taiwan. This type of spin has the potential to convince many people that China’s censorship and repression are a recipe for effective governance rather than blunt tools for entrenching political power.
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Freedom House is founded on the core conviction that freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people. We speak out against threats to democracy and empower individuals to exercise their fundamental rights through a unique combination of analysis, advocacy, and direct support to frontline defenders of freedom, especially those working in closed authoritarian societies. The United States has a deeply rooted rule-of-law tradition, and legal and constitutional protections for due process are widely observed. However, the criminal justice system suffers from a number of chronic weaknesses, many of which are tied to racial discrimination and contribute to disparities in outcomes that disadvantage people of color, particularly Black Americans. Beginning in 2017, however, the Trump administration presented a number of challenges to existing norms of government ethics and probity. Anticorruption watchdogs criticized President Trump for shifting management of his real-estate development empire to his children rather than divesting ownership or establishing a stronger structural barrier between himself and his businesses.
Early implementation of expert recommendations, the deployment of masks and other protective equipment, and efficient contact-tracing and testing efforts that prioritized transparency—combined with the country’s island geography—all helped to control the disease. Meanwhile, Beijing escalated its campaign to sway global opinion against Taiwan’s government and deny the success of its democracy, in part by successfully pressuring the World Health Organization to ignore early warnings of human-to-human transmission from Taiwan and to exclude Taiwan from its World Health Assembly. Even before the virus struck, Taiwanese voters defied a multipronged, politicized disinformation campaign from China and overwhelmingly reelected incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen, who opposes moves toward unification with the mainland. In fact, Belarus was far from the only place where the promise of increased freedom raised by mass protests eventually curdled into heightened repression. Of the 39 countries and territories where Freedom House noted major protests in 2019, 23 experienced a score decline for 2020—a significantly higher share than countries with declines represented in the world at large. In settings as varied as Algeria, Guinea, and India, regimes that protests had taken by surprise in 2019 regained their footing, arresting and prosecuting demonstrators, passing newly restrictive laws, and in some cases resorting to brutal crackdowns, for which they faced few international repercussions.
USAGM names Freedom House president as new VOA director - Voice of America - VOA News
USAGM names Freedom House president as new VOA director.
Posted: Fri, 19 Apr 2024 16:42:25 GMT [source]
The end product represents the consensus of the analysts, outside advisers, and Freedom House staff, who are responsible for any final decisions. Although an element of subjectivity is unavoidable in such an enterprise, the ratings process emphasizes methodological consistency, intellectual rigor, and balanced and unbiased judgments. More broadly, democracy has demonstrated its adaptability under the unique constraints of a world afflicted by COVID-19. A number of successful elections were held across all regions and in countries at all income levels, including in Montenegro, and in Bolivia, yielding improvements.
The use of military force by authoritarian states, another symptom of the global decay of democratic norms, was on display in Nagorno-Karabakh last year. New fighting erupted in September when the Azerbaijani regime, with decisive support from Turkey, launched an offensive to settle a territorial dispute that years of diplomacy with Armenia had failed to resolve. At least 6,500 combatants and hundreds of civilians were killed, and tens of thousands of people were newly displaced. Meaningful international engagement was absent, and the war only stopped when Moscow imposed a peacekeeping plan on the two sides, fixing in place the Azerbaijani military’s territorial gains but leaving many other questions unanswered. The widespread protest movements of 2019, which had signaled the popular desire for good governance the world over, often collided with increased repression in 2020. While successful protests in countries such as Chile and Sudan led to democratic improvements, there were many more examples in which demonstrators succumbed to crackdowns, with oppressive regimes benefiting from a distracted and divided international community.
Meanwhile, the wage gap between White and Black workers has grown in recent decades, meaning Black women, who are affected by both the gender and racial components of wage inequality, made about 61 cents for every dollar earned by White male workers as of 2017. A popular social media campaign that began in late 2017, the #MeToo movement, encouraged victims to speak out about their experiences. The phenomenon has led to the sudden downfall of powerful men in the worlds of politics, business, news, and entertainment, while underscoring the scale of the problem in American society. An array of policies and programs are designed to protect the rights of individuals against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other categories, including in the workplace. However, women and some minority groups continue to suffer from disparities on various indicators, and a number of recent government policies have infringed on the fundamental rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants.
State Licenses are permits issued by government agencies that allow rehab organizations to conduct business legally within a certain geographical area. Typically, the kind of program a rehab facility offers, along with its physical location, determines which licenses are required to operate legally. With programs in nearly 20 countries, Freedom House offers opportunities to grow within the organization, and to learn from the diverse experience of our domestic and international staff. In response to the death of Russian democratic opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, who died in Russian custody while unjustly incarcerated, Freedom House joins partners in requesting the Biden Administration to accelerate efforts to free imprisoned Russian democracy advocate, Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Meanwhile, restrictions on freedoms of expression and association have worsened over time, pushing the country’s scores deeper into the Partly Free range. The outbreak exposed weaknesses across all the pillars of democracy, from elections and the rule of law to egregiously disproportionate restrictions on freedoms of assembly and movement. Both democracies and dictatorships experienced successes and failures in their battle with the virus itself, though citizens in authoritarian states had fewer tools to resist and correct harmful policies. Ultimately, the changes precipitated by the pandemic left many societies—with varied regime types, income levels, and demographics—in worse political condition; with more pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities; and vulnerable to long-term effects. The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020. Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days.
Freedom House’s analysis of the state of global democracy and extensive work with front-line activists gives us unique credibility to advocate for policies that would reinforce democratic governance in the United States and around the world. We work closely with policymakers to protect human rights and to vigorously oppose dictatorship and oppression. We enable political dissidents and rights defenders to tell their stories to the US Congress and executive branch, the news media, and the United Nations, ensuring that first-hand information reaches decision makers.
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