Impunity is the exercise of power without accountability, which becomes, in its clearest form, the commission of crimes without punishment. While the chief perpetrators of impunity are often a country's most powerful actors, its victims are generally ordinary people.
Impunity provides an invaluable lens for understanding what is going on in the world today, not just in conflict zones but also across spheres ranging from the global economy to the environment and political institutions.
The
Atlas of Impunity is a quantitative assessment of this holistic definition of impunity, measured by independent indicators across five sites in society. This year's Atlas scores and ranks the level of impunity in 170 countries and provides partial, indicative scoring for another 27.
In its third edition, the Atlas takes a citizen-centric approach, putting a country's people at its core. The report's data for 2024 and its historical series have been revised to ensure that the figures included more clearly measure impunity as experienced by a country's residents.
The Atlas is intended to provide a practical and accessible tool to draw attention to abuses of power and press policymakers for change. The report and accompanying data aim to shine a light on the norms and practices that perpetuate impunity and hinder accountability around the world.
The map above shows the overall and dimension impunity scores and rankings for the 170 countries with full data. Each country is scored on the five dimensions of impunity – unaccountable governance, abuse of human rights, economic exploitation, conflict and violence, and environmental degradation – and then each country is given an overall impunity score based on the average of its scores across the five dimensions.
Countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 5, with the countries exhibiting the greatest level of impunity scoring closer to 5, and the countries with the lowest level of impunity scoring closer to 0.
- 0 to 0.99
- 1.00 to 1.99
- 2.00 to 2.99
- 3.00 to 3.99
- 4.00 to 5.00
Most Impunity
| Country |
Rank |
Score |
| Syria |
1 |
3.43 |
| Yemen |
2 |
3.41 |
| Myanmar |
3 |
3.39 |
| Afghanistan |
4 |
3.38 |
| South Sudan |
5 |
3.33 |
Least Impunity
| Country |
Rank |
Score |
| Finland |
170 |
0.59 |
| Denmark |
169 |
0.63 |
| Sweden |
168 |
0.70 |
| Switzerland |
167 |
0.71 |
| Norway |
166 |
0.74 |
*Overall ranks and scores shown.
Key Findings
Syria tops the 2024 Atlas of Impunity with an overall score of 3.43 out of 5. Following 13 years of civil war, the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 offers Syrians hope for a new political process that stabilizes the country and restores accountability if further infighting can be averted.
Some of the Atlas's most improved countries in 2024, including Sierra Leone and Guatemala, provide further reasons for optimism. In Sierra Leone, where residents have seen the most improvement on these Atlas metrics since 2019, reduced violence and a series of reforms have greatly improved accountability. In Guatemala, the third-most improved country year-on-year, the election of anticorruption candidate Bernardo Arevalo in 2023 and the failure of authorities' efforts to keep him out of office or overturn the vote have underpinned greater accountability.
In a major year for electoral politics, the Atlas recorded a notable uptick in unaccountable governance, both globally and in most geographic regions. The indicators driving the uptick are largely backward-looking, reflecting developments that took place in 2023 or the structural conditions against which 2024's elections unfolded rather than outcomes at the polls last year. A plausible interpretation of the unaccountable governance scores is that voters' mounting frustration with the political process contributed to the backlash against incumbents at the polls.
Global and regional averages on the conflict and violence dimension of the Atlas remained relatively stable in 2024, but underlying raw data from key Atlas indicators point to a rise in levels of violence. Much of this fighting is concentrated in a small number of countries and territories that have recorded high scores on this dimension for several years—which explains the stability in the global average.
Analytic work on the Atlas is led by the Geostrategy team at Eurasia Group. The project is chaired by an external, independent global advisory board composed of human rights experts and activists, former diplomats, and former government officials with a range of regional and policy perspectives. It was made possible by generous financial support from the Open Society Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The data used for this edition of the Atlas comes from sources published through September 2024.
