The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research highlighted a recent analytical report, based on data from the 2025 Academic Freedom Index (AFI), which shows that Iraq has made a remarkable leap in academic freedom levels. Its score rose to 0.604 on a scale of 0 to 1, compared to 0.412 in 2024.

The report (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/academic-freedom-index), which is based on the 2026 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project database, places Iraq in a leading position, ranking almost second among the Arab countries and regions included in the database, according to the index’s central estimated value. It comes just behind Lebanon, with a very slight difference of only 0.014 points, significantly surpassing the Arab median of 0.240.