Nepal today looks like a textbook case of “illiberal democracy.” The country holds competitive elections and changes governments through the ballot box, but core liberal rights—free expression, religious liberty, equal treatment before the law, and checks on executive power—are consistently narrowed or unevenly enforced. This combination of electoral competition and weakened civil liberties is what scholars mean by an illiberal democracy: a political system that is democratic in form yet illiberal in practice.
Start with the scoreboard. Freedom House rates Nepal “Partly Free,” with a 2024 global freedom score of 62/100, made up of 28/40 for political rights and 34/60 for civil liberties. The summary makes clear why: formal institutions exist, yet corruption persists, key rights are unevenly protected, and transitional-justice bodies remain unfulfilled. These are not the marks of a liberal rule-of-law state but of an electoral system that struggles to protect basic freedoms beyond election day.
Recent history shows how fragile constitutional norms can be. In 2020 and again in May 2021, then–Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli dissolved the lower house, triggering a constitutional crisis. Nepal’s Supreme Court ultimately reinstated parliament and ordered the appointment of a rival as prime minister in July 2021. The Court’s intervention was a democratic backstop, but the attempted dissolutions themselves were classic illiberal moves—executive bids to sidestep legislative constraints.
Freedom of expression illustrates the pattern even more starkly. Authorities have repeatedly used the Electronic Transactions Act (ETA)—a law ostensibly aimed at cybercrime—to detain or investigate critics and journalists for online speech. Human Rights Watch has documented arrests and called for reforms to stop abuse of the ETA, while the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in February 2024 that two reporters were arrested under Section 47 of the Act following posts about alleged police misconduct. The message such prosecutions send is chilling: criticism can be criminalized if it travels over the internet.
The trend accelerated this week. On Sept 4, Nepal announced it would block major social media platforms—including Facebook and, reportedly, others—that did not register with the government and appoint local compliance officers. Officials framed this as “responsible” regulation; opposition parties and rights groups warned it was a broad tool for censorship. No liberal democracy should be comfortable with a government switch that can throttle the main channels of public discourse.
Religious freedom is constrained by law in ways that are hard to square with liberal principles. Nepal’s 2015 Constitution proclaims secularism, but the 2017 Penal Code criminalizes “converting” another person and contains “blasphemy-style” offences that penalize outraging religious feelings, with penalties that can include imprisonment. The International Commission of Jurists has warned that these provisions are vague and open to abuse, chilling legitimate religious teaching and expression. Liberalism protects the individual’s right to persuade as well as to believe; criminalizing peaceful proselytism curtails that liberty.
Rule of law also suffers from pervasive corruption—another hallmark of illiberal systems where institutions are captured or politicized. Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index gives Nepal a score of 34/100 and ranks it 107th of 180 countries. That low score signals weak safeguards and uneven enforcement, which in turn erodes equal treatment before the law and citizens’ trust that public power serves public, not private, ends.
Transitional justice remains a long, unfinished project, undermining accountability for grave abuses during the 1996–2006 conflict. Parliament adopted a new law in Aug 2024 to restart the process, but Amnesty International and others flagged serious gaps, and victims’ groups criticized the 2025 appointments to the two commissions as politicized. Human Rights Watch’s submission to Nepal’s 2025 Universal Periodic Review describes continuing impunity and warns that the social media bill would add new speech crimes with prison terms. A liberal order requires credible accountability for past crimes and robust protection for present dissent; Nepal is still falling short on both.
Citizenship rights show progress mixed with persistent discrimination. In May 2023, President Ramchandra Paudel authenticated amendments to the Citizenship Act, clearing a path to documents for hundreds of thousands—especially in the Tarai—who had long been effectively stateless. Yet rights groups note remaining gender-based discrimination, including limits on women’s ability to pass citizenship on equal terms, illustrating how formal fixes do not automatically produce equal rights in practice. An illiberal democracy often delivers partial reforms that leave basic inequalities intact.
To be fair, Nepal has also seen liberalizing decisions from its courts, notably the Supreme Court’s 2023 interim order enabling registration of same-sex marriages, with the first registration recorded that November. These are genuine steps toward a more open society, and Freedom House credits them as improvements. But those bright spots coexist with a broader environment where speech can bring handcuffs, religion is policed, corruption is entrenched, and executive power tests constitutional limits. Liberal democracy is not only about counting votes; it is about guarding rights. On that test, Nepal still falls short.
Nepal’s voters deserve better than a choice between instability and control. A liberal path is available: repeal or overhaul the ETA and any new social media law to protect legitimate speech; narrow or scrap anti-conversion clauses that criminalize peaceful persuasion; empower truly independent anti-corruption and human rights bodies; and make transitional justice credible, victim-centered, and insulated from political horse-trading. Until reforms like these take hold, the most accurate description of Nepal’s political system is an illiberal democracy: electoral, yes—but not fully free.
