Our key takeaway: The link is made. Countries that routinely violate fundamental freedoms and civil liberties are more corrupt, and in turn repression of civil rights leads to more corruption. Nearly all of the murders of human rights defenders over the last decade occurred in countries ranked as highly corrupt.
Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks 180 countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and business people. The index uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.