The Middle East and North Africa region has the lowest Regional Expression Score and Human Score in the world.

Both scores saw a bump after the Arab Spring, but those gains have been incrementally eroded over the last 10 years.

Not a single country in the region has been categorised as Open in the last two decades, and more than half (56%) the countries in the region are now in Crisis.

Advances in expression are rare in the Middle East and North Africa: Neither over the last decade nor in the last year has a single country advanced in score. Between 2017 and 2022, however, Israel saw a 7-point increase. 

Over the past decade, country-level scores in the region have seen a combined decrease of 108 points. These declines have ranged from 28 points (Yemen) to 3 points (United Arab Emirates): a smaller range of declines than in other regions, mostly due to how low Expression Scores in the region already are. 

Violations of freedom of expression are muted by the already-low scores in much of the region: While crackdowns occur and repression escalates, the scores have nowhere left to fall, and thus do not register as significant declines.