Democratic Freedoms

Freedoms, Democratic 

political and legal norms determining the position of the individual in the state.

Political democratic freedoms include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, which includes freedom to hold meetings, marches, and demonstrations. Personal democratic freedoms include inviolability of person and home; privacy of correspondence, telephone conversations, and telegraphic communications; and freedom of conscience, or the right to profess or to decline to profess religious beliefs.

Bourgeois constitutions and laws proclaim democratic freedoms but do not generally provide effective guarantees. The government has emergency powers to suspend or nullify various articles of the constitution that establish democratic freedoms.

In the socialist countries the law not only recognizes the democratic freedoms of citizens but also provides material and legal guarantees for exercising them. [23–255–2; revised by the Soviet editors]