PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenia's score in the Freedom on the Net 2021 report by Freedom House has declined by 4 notches, dropping from 75 in 2020 to 71 this year, though the country continues to be classified as Free.

Scores are based on a scale of 0 (least free) to 100 (most free).

Internet freedom in Armenia declined significantly as a result of restrictions on the free flow of information the government adopted during the war launched by Azerbaijan against Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in fall 2020, the report says.

"The implementation of martial law in late September 2020 placed broad restrictions on the media’s ability to report on the fighting, including by banning speech deemed to endanger national security, permitting authorities to demand content removal, and mandating fines for noncompliance. A number of Turkish and Azerbaijani websites with .az and .tr domains were inaccessible for several weeks. Users also reported problems accessing TikTok. Prominent news sites also faced technical attacks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, leaving many of them temporarily inaccessible during the conflict. In a positive move, a measure that had required telecommunications companies to provide authorities with subscriber metadata in order to facilitate contact tracing, adopted in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, was lifted in September 2020 alongside a virus-related state of emergency," the report says.

"The government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has pledged to deal with long-standing problems including systemic corruption, opaque policymaking, a flawed electoral system, and weak rule of law. Despite the government’s reformist stance, concerns about political interference in the judiciary and hostile rhetoric toward the media from government officials persist. In 2020 the country’s politics were seriously destabilized when armed conflict with Azerbaijani forces broke out over control of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh."

With a score of 77, neighboring Georgia too is classified as Free, while Azerbaijan (35), Iran (16), Turkey (34) and Russia (30) are classified as Not Free.

Freedom on the Net 2021 covers 70 countries in 6 regions around the world. The countries were chosen to illustrate internet freedom improvements and declines in a variety of political systems.