Croatia placed 23rd out of 27 EU countries in the new global freedom rankings compiled by the Freedom House NGO, Vecernji List daily reported on Thursday, adding that Croatia was also ranked ahead of the United States.

The rankings were published in the latest Freedom in the World 2021 report, a yearly overview which Freedom House uses to rate people’s access to political rights and civil liberties in 210 countries and territories.

In the rankings, which assign scores to countries based on a set of criteria related to democracy and human rights, Croatia’s received a score of 85, placing it in the category of “free countries,” while the United States got 83 points, the same as Monaco, Panama, Romania, and South Korea.

Three Scandinavian countries – Finland, Norway and Sweden – shared the top spot with the maximum score of 100. On the other end of the ranking, only Syria and Tibet (rated separately from the rest of China) received the minimum score of 1 point.

“Civil and political rights are generally respected, though corruption in the public sector is a serious issue,” Freedom House’s analysts wrote about Croatia.

Within the European Union, Croatia ranked 23rd out of 27 countries, besting Romania (83 pts), Poland (82 pts), Bulgaria (78 pts) and Hungary (69 pts). Hungary is the only EU country placed in the “partly free” category.

As for the Western Balkans, all six countries and territories were rated as “partly free” – Albania (66 pts), North Macedonia (66 pts), Serbia (64 pts), Montenegro (63 pts), Kosovo (54 pts), and Bosnia (53 pts).

As for trends in the region, Croatia and Bosnia had no change in rating this year. Serbia and Kosovo slid by 2 pts from last year, and Albania slid by 1. Montenegro had a 1 point increase while North Macedonia improved its score by 3 points – the best year-on-year improvement on the continent.

Other European countries which saw improvement were Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Moldova.

The worst rated countries in Europe, all categorized as “not free,” are Belarus (11 pts), Russia (20 pts), and Turkey (32 pts). Disputed territories of Ukraine, which are rated separately, fared even worse with Crimea getting only 7 pts and eastern Donbas getting 4 pts.

As for the global developments in 2020, the NGO says that “as a lethal pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny.”

Freedom House said that 2020 was the “15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.”

“The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening… The impact of the long-term democratic decline has become increasingly global in nature, broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies,” Freedom House analysts said.