In 1941, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, President Franklin Roosevelt‘s Republican challenger the previous year, founded Freedom House “to rally policymakers and a broadly isolationist American public around the fight against Nazi Germany and to raise awareness of the fascist threat to American security and values.” With the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, Freedom House shifted its mission to defend democracy more explicitly. In recent decades, the group has sought to quantify this. Both in-house and with the contribution of outside scholars, Freedom House seeks to quantify the quality of democracy and freedom by measuring the political freedoms of every country in the world, including those that lack international recognition and self-governing territories.
For years, Freedom House ranked not only Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan but also Nagorno-Karabakh, whose people had governed themselves since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Abkhazia, a proxy state Russia established after invading Georgia. While Freedom House ranks Azerbaijan as even more dictatorial than Iran, Russia, and China, it labels Armenia and Georgia as “partly free,” basically flawed democracies in the same category as Mexico and India. Both Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia have received “party-free” ratings as well. Abkhazia’s superior ranking to Russia suggests that more than 15 years after Russian forces established it to punish democracy in Georgia, it may no longer be as much of a Kremlin proxy as many Americans believe.
Azerbaijan can depict itself as secular, free, and tolerant, but facts do not lie. While Azerbaijanis, their lobbyists, and their unregistered proxies in Washington think tanks repeat as a mantra that Nagorno-Karabakh was Azerbaijan, the reality is it was always separate. Historically, Armenian princes ruled Nagorno-Karabakh as vassals, first to Persia and then to Russian conquerors. During the Armenian genocide, Ottoman forces sought to conquer Nagorno-Karabakh but failed. During the Soviet era, Nagorno-Karabakh existed as an autonomous oblast, constitutionally a separate entity. The first time Azerbaijan claimed direct control over Nagorno-Karabakh was in September 2023, when Azerbaijani forces expelled the region’s population. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s storm troopers then dynamited the Nagorno-Karabakh Parliament to reinforce the end of any pretense of democracy.
Last year, Freedom House did the world a service by allowing its Nagorno-Karabakh rankings to reflect the reality of life under Azerbaijani control. In its 2022 report, Freedom House ranked the Armenian statelet as “partly free” with a score of 36. Its ranking increased slightly the following year, only to plummet to negative three — the worst in the world — in 2024. Put another way, Armenians face more repression under Azerbaijani rule than those struggling under the world’s worst dictatorships: North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, and South Sudan.
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The situation in the occupied Armenian region has not improved, but alas, in its newly released 2025 report, Freedom House simply erased Nagorno-Karabakh entirely; it has disappeared from the report, rankings, and map. This is a bizarre move on Freedom House’s part: Rather than stand up for democracy in the face of dictatorship, it accepted Azerbaijan’s erasure of Nagorno-Karabakh’s identity and population. Even for Freedom House, this is an exception rather than the rule: 75 years after Chinese communists conquered Tibet, the organization rightly continues to assess its lack of freedom separately. Tibet rightly ranks at zero, even worse than the rest of communist China.
Such a betrayal has ramifications. Dictators hate when Democrats shine a light on their reality. If Freedom House shows total eradication of democracies can relieve them of attention and criticism, then they will not even turn their conquests into tourist museums like China does in Tibet and east Turkestan (Xinjiang). It will simply seek to complete genocide as Azerbaijan now does in Nagorno-Karabakh. Whether purposely or not, Freedom House has become complicit.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.