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While neighboring Azerbaijan aggressively stifled political opposition, Georgia and Armenia conducted parliamentary elections under new electoral laws that emphasized equal access to campaign resources and media coverage, the Freedom House new report on “Nations in Transit 2013” reads.

Freedom House report analysed progress of democracy of 29 countries in the central Europe and Eurasia. According to the document the authoritarian countries among which was Azerbaijan, adoted new laws limiting the freedom.

It says that, for the first time, the Armenian National Congress, which had formerly denounced all government institutions, won seats in Armenia’s National Assembly and began participating in parliamentary politics.

“The democracy gap between Azerbaijan and its Caucasian neighbors continued to grow in 2012. The peaceful and more inclusive elections in Georgia and Armenia contrasted sharply with the brutal suppression of public gatherings in the run-up to the Eurovision song contest in Baku,” the Freedom House writes.

When Hungarian authorities made a surprising decision to repatriate former Azerbaijani army officer Ramil Safarov, who had been imprisoned for brutally murdering an Armenian officer while training in Budapest in 2004, the government in Baku gave him a hero’s welcome and immediately set him free, thereby halting any progress in Azerbaijan’s negotiations with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Summing up, the organization notes, that in the sphere of civil liberties and corruption, Azerbaijan has registered a regression without achieving any progress in no area, while Armenia has provided improvements in media freedom and has generally improved its democracy along with the Czech Republic, Latvia, Georgia, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan.