South Africa is now part of an organisation that essentially does not even vaguely have democracy as its guiding light.

Finally, the BRICS grouping has announced that six more countries will join the group: Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

For me, the first and most important aspect of the countries chosen is that the group has become less democratic. By the Freedom House definition of democracy, which focuses in particular on political rights and civil liberties, the average freedom status of the old BRICS grouping was 52 out of 100, making the group generally free.

The new grouping heavily favours undemocratic countries, or at least countries that are less free. By the Freedom House definition, the group now scores, on average, 38/100, which would put it in the NGO's "not-free" camp. In fact, the only new country they consider to be "free" is Argentina. Clearly, freedom was not an important criterion when deciding who should join.

There has been some criticism of Freedom House's methodology; freedom is difficult to define if you really want to be nitpicking. But the alternative measure produced by Polity, if anything, makes it even more obvious that the group is becoming less free on average. The Polity score for the BRICS group was 4.6 out of 10. The...