China has been ranked as the worst country in the world for safety from the state and the right to assembly, in a human rights report that tracks social, economic and political freedoms.
The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), a New Zealand-based project, has been monitoring various countries’ human rights performance since 2017.
In 2022, HRMI started tracking freedom of religion and belief for the first time. China also scored worst on this indicator, although the pilot study only covered nine countries.
HRMI concluded that on several measures China was the country in the world with the worst human rights record. On freedom from arbitrary arrest, only Kazakhstan scored worse.
However, on certain economic indicators, such as the right to food, health and housing, China scored relatively highly, coming near the top of more than 100 surveyed countries. For the economic indicators HRMI uses publicly available statistics published by national and international institutions, rather than surveys.