The 25 countries in the world with the least amount of freedom

SANA/Handout via REUTERS

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets with Syrian army soldiers in eastern Ghouta, Syria, March 18, 2018.

• The independent watchdog organization Freedom House annually measures the freedom of every country around the world.

• Freedom House measures freedom in terms of civil liberties and political rights and compiles data from media, research articles, government documents, and other sources to compute each country's freedom score.

Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that releases an annual report on freedom around the world, measures freedom in terms of civil liberties and political rights.

Their annual report, Freedom in the World, "operates from the assumption that freedom for all people is best achieved in liberal democratic societies."

In 2018, more than 130 in-house and external analysts and advisers from academia, think tanks, and human rights institutions created the report by collecting data from media, research articles, government documents, and other sources.

That data was then used to score a country's political rights on a scale of 0 to 40 and its civil liberties on a scale of 0 to 60, with a total freedom score of 100 being the highest and 0 being the lowest.

Freedom House measured political rights by the degree with which a country's elections are determined to be free and fair, as well as by the extent of political pluralism and participation. The group measured civil liberties, on the other hand, by how free and independent the media is and the extent of freedom of expression and assembly.

In the ranking below, countries with a shared freedom rating were listed by alphabetical order. Countries with an asterisk also denote territories, not independent countries.

Check out the 25 countries with the least freedom below: