What are the freest and least free countries in Asia?

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Asia is home to some of the world’s freest and least free countries. East Asian countries (excluding China and North Korea), have the best score when it comes human freedom in Asia. Southeast and South Asia also does pretty well. Most countries there score over 6.00.

There are 5 countries in Asia that score higher than 8.00: Taiwan (8.44), Japan (8.39), Armenia (8.14), South Korea (8.11) and Hong Kong (8.01). Taiwan even ranks 14th globally and Japan 16th. Hong Kong’s score is still relatively high, but has been dropping significantly in recent years and is expected to keep dropping after the crack-down of the 2019 protests and the deterioration of rule of law and personal freedoms in Hong Kong by the CCP. In 2009, Hong Kong still had a score of 8.97, ranking 3rd globally. Regarding Hong Kong, the report writes that “Given ongoing attacks on freedom in Hong Kong, we will be surprised if future reports do not show a continuing and pronounced degradation in the territory’s ratings, including a noticeable decline in economic freedom.”

5 Asian countries are represented in the global bottom 10 of the Human Freedom Index: Iraq (4.77), Saudi Arabia (4.56), Iran (4.26), Yemen (3.94) and Syria (3.30). Syria and Yemen even have the lowest and second lowest score globally. Overall, the Middle East is not scoring very well when it comes to human freedom.

The recently released report by the Cato Institute, measures the Human Freedom per country over 2020. On a scale form 0 to 10, countries were judged on the following areas:

• Rule of Law
• Security and Safety
• Movement
• Religion
• Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
• Expression and Information
• Identity and Relationships
• Size of Government
• Legal System and Property Rights
• Access to Sound Money
• Freedom to Trade Internationally
• Regulation of Credit, Labour, and Business