The 27 countries in the world with the most freedom

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Sweden supporters enjoy the atmosphere prior to the UEFA EURO 2016 Group E match between Republic of Ireland and Sweden at Stade de France on June 13, 2016 in Paris, France.

Freedom means different things to different people.

But Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that releases an annual report on freedom around the world, measures it 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 0-40 and its civil liberties on a scale of 0-60.

Freedom House measured political rights by the degree with which a country's elections are free and fair, as well as by how much political pluralism and participation there is. Civil liberties, on the other hand, were measured by how free and independent the media is and how much freedom of expression and assembly there is.

Those scores were then assigned a numerical rating of one through seven, and subsequently averaged to obtain the country's overall freedom rating.

For example, the US received 33 out of 40 points for political rights, and 53 out of 60 points for civil liberties, giving the land of the free a total of 86 out of 100 points. Consequently, it received a freedom rating of 1.5 out of 7.

That score makes the US a free country (1.0 to 2.5 is free; 3.0 to 5.0 is partly free; and 5.5 to 7.0 is not free), but not the freest in the world by any means.

In the ranking below, countries with a shared freedom rating were listed by alphabetical order, except for the three countries that received the top score.

Check out the 27 countries with the most freedom below: