Steve Chapman Says This Was a Bad Year for Freedom

The course of freedom and democracy in the world is an
evolutionary process, though sometimes it proceeds in the wrong
direction. Wines have good years and bad years. If 2013 were a
wine, you’d use it to kill weeds. Mohamed Morsi began the year as
the first democratically elected president of Egypt. He ended it in
a jail cell facing charges of treason, having been evicted in a
military coup just 12 months after being inaugurated. When his
supporters massed in protests following his overthrow, security
forces killed nearly 1,000 of them. Elsewhere in the region, the
Arab Spring was a fading memory. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, one of
the dictators who survived it, used poison gas against rebels
before accepting international demands to give up his chemical
arsenal. The list of abuses goes on. Steve Chapman argues that
political leaders across the globe continued to violate the rights
of innumerable citizens this year.  

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