On October 28th the Washington-based NGO, Freedom House, published its annual report on internet freedom in the world. Presented as a map, it gives an overview of the state of internet freedoms in the Mediterranean, assigning scores of 0 (total freedom) to 100 (no freedom) for each State.
Syria (87) and Egypt (61) are rated as the most restrictive countries in the Mediterranean region. Then come Turkey (58), Libya (54) and Jordan (50), where Freedom House considers web-surfers are “partly free”, as they are in the Lebanon (48), Morocco (45) and Tunisia (38), although the NGO adds that the situation for the last three has improved compared to 2014.
As far as Italy (23) and France (24) are concerned, it notes that freedoms have declined during the year, mainly because of increased surveillance on the Internet as part of anti-terrorism laws, following the attacks of January 2015 .
No data is available for other Mediterranean countries in this study, funded by (amongst many others) the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Instrument of Democracy and Human Rights, the US State Department, Google Yahoo!, Facebook and Twitter.
Source : Freedom House
