Democracies Face Threats to Freedom : Human rights: Group warns of risks from ethnic tensions, corruption, militaries.

Although world changes in 1994 have contributed to a record 114 democracies, many of those societies face critical threats from ethnic tensions, runaway corruption, excessive powers of the military or destabilization from abroad, says a Freedom House report released Thursday.

“Many democracies face serious challenges to their stability and are incapable of guaranteeing the basic rights of their citizens,” warned Adrian Karatnycky, president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan, nonprofit human rights group based in New York.

Its annual survey of the world’s 191 countries is the only respected, independent survey rating freedom worldwide.

Among key examples cited in the report are Russia and Ukraine, world players undergoing “wrenching transitions.”

Both are only partly free because of the absence of effective civic institutions, a truly free press or an independent judiciary, the report says. Russia also “now threatens some neighbors and colludes in efforts to topple certain indigenous authorities,” it asserts. Both countries risk serious regression.

They are among 38 of 114 formal democracies that are not fully free, Freedom House’s rating system shows. It divides all 191 countries into three categories: free; partly free or lacking some human rights or civil liberties; not free and lacking most or all rights and liberties.

Elsewhere, major democracies such as India and Turkey, as well as some new African democracies, have witnessed a “substantial” erosion of liberties because of ethnic and inter-sectarian strife.

Many Latin American democracies--including Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela--now face debilitating problems from chronic corruption and influential drug cartels.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is the only formal democracy rated not free, because of its inability to provide civil order as it copes with ethnic strife and external destabilization.

Freedom, the report concludes, “continues to elude the vast majority of the world’s people, with nearly 80% living in partly free and not free states.”

Of the world’s 191 states, 54 are without civil liberties and human rights--compared to 61 that have varying but limited degrees of freedom and 76 rated as fully free. Being a democracy does not mean that a country is fully free. And non-democratic states can have some freedoms, such as free markets.

The survey also issued warnings about future world flash points.

“Rwanda’s ethnic holocaust provided the archetypal nightmare that could occur elsewhere,” it says. Somalia, where clan warfare rages on, faces partition. In India, military atrocities in Kashmir are an “underreported human rights debacle,” while tensions are also mounting within the Hindu community and between Hindus and Muslims, the report says.

In the Middle East, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is engaged in an open campaign to “annihilate” the southern Shiite Muslim community and a covert campaign against northern Kurds.

Regionally, Africa is the most volatile part of the world because of the weakness of civil society, the private sector and trade unions, as well as the “overarching influence of military elites” in African political life, the report says.

Despite the problems facing new and old democracies, the report struck an optimistic note.

Almost 20% of the world’s population now lives in societies with a complete range of freedoms. Seven new democracies this year--South Africa, Haiti, Ukraine, Mozambique, Malawi, Guinea-Bissau and Palau--account for an increase of about 70 million people.

Even Africa has shown dramatic progress. Over the last five years, formal democracies in sub-Sahara Africa have mushroomed from three to 19. But only eight of those democracies are rated as free.