The Covid-19 pandemic’s lasting impact on press freedom, unprecedented crackdowns on reporters covering protests, and a war in the Caucasus, in which at least seven journalists were injured and reporting was obstructed, all helped to keep Eastern Europe and Central Asia in second from last position in the 2021 Index’s ranking of regions.
A dangerous fever swept some countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that for the most part were already suffering from information suppression syndrome. Three of them experimented with a radical treatment for silencing journalists – total Internet shutdowns with the help of cyber-security software, provided in some cases by international tech companies such as Israel’s Allot and Canada’s Sandvine.
This was the case in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan (down 1 at 167th) during the war in the autumn of 2020 in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory disputed with Armenia (down 2 at 63rd). It was the case in Kyrgyzstan (down 3 at 79th) after the disputed parliamentary elections in October 2020, although this is Central Asia’s best-ranked country. And it was the case in Belarus (down 5 at 158th), where the Internet was completely inaccessible for three days after the controversial results of the presidential election were announced, andthen intermittently in the following months. According to the #KeepItOn coalition, which monitors Internet shutdowns, the Internet was shut down for a total of 121 days from August to December in Belarus.
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