Europe’s political approach to the coronavirus pandemic has divided sharp east-west lines, a Guardian analysis has shown.

Five of the 18 Eastern European countries have recorded major violations of international democratic freedoms since March 2020, reports research conducted by the Variety of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), compared to none of the 12 Western European countries.

The survey also shows that Eastern European countries have been more likely to resort to abuses of enforcement, misinformation and discriminatory measures, with media restrictions being the most common violations.

The worst violations were observed in Serbia, which recorded three times higher estimates of violations than the European average. Under a special state of emergency regime, refugees, migrants and asylum seekers have been selectively targeted and placed in strict 24-hour quarantine under the control of the military. They were banned from leaving the centers and auxiliary staff were barred from entering.

Belgium was the only Western European country where moderate infringements occurred. The state recorded ethnic profiling during the pandemic, according to the V-Dem Institute, with abuses of police practice disproportionately affecting minority ethnic communities.

The death of a 19-year-old man of North African descent during a police crackdown has sparked anti-racism protests, and people have demanded justice and accountability. It was later issued by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Cerd) report expresses its concern at the discriminatory actions of the police.

Experts say such actions often follow government-imposed Covid-19 measures and have no clear basis in the rule of law.

Joelle Grogan, a senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University, noted that experts from 24 of the 27 EU countries reported at least some concerns about restrictive measures that do not fall within the government’s legal powers.

Despite “almost all countries struggling to balance the rule of law with intense pressure to take action in emergencies,” she said that did not mean we should be equally concerned about all countries.

The Guardian’s analysis also revealed how some Eastern Central European governments, with a history of undermining democratic principles, have used the pandemic to further spread anti-democratic practices.

In Slovenia, the government imposed financial and legal restrictions on non-governmental organizations and amended environmental legislation as part of one of its coronavirus stimulus packages. As of June 23, 2021, the state was added to the va watch list civil liberties are rapidly declining.

“Since the government came to power, it has used Covid-19 as a pretext to try to take measures that affect basic human rights,” he said. Civicus, a global alliance of civil society.

The Polish parliament recently passed a media law that takes away TVN, Poland’s main private network, and continues the government’s efforts to control the media. The level of risk to Poland’s democratic freedoms is more than three times higher than the European average.

Grogan said there were deep concerns about the “crisis of the rule of law, when many EU countries are systematically undermining and dismantling democratic institutions”.

In addition to Hungary and Poland, there has been a significant democratic decline since 2010 in Serbia, Turkey and Slovenia.

While democratic regimes in most of Western Europe have remained fairly stable, four Eastern European countries have moved from liberal to electoral democracies, according to the V-Dem Institute. The other two – Hungary and Serbia – have moved from electoral democracy to electoral autocracy.

For Grogan, there is a risk in democratic violations in the name of normalizing emergency response. “The risk of normalizing the state of emergency is that common expectations about what rights we can exercise unconditionally are forgotten, and decisions that the government should only take with permission are ignored: we can say we have democracy but we don’t live in it. “

However, there is hope, as he argues that authoritarianism is fundamentally dependent on public support. “For ordinary people – protest, objection and education [are] the best resistance to anti-democratic trends. “

About data

The Liberal Democracy Index, developed by the V-Dem Institute, assesses the level of democracy and the strength of democratic institutions in each country on a scale of 0 to 1. It measures election quality, suffrage, freedom of expression and media, freedom of association, executive restrictions and governance. rights. It consists of several smaller indices and seeks to provide a comprehensive assessment of the quality of democracy in the country.