WUNRN
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/aug/26/ngos-face-restrictions-laws-human-rights-generation
Also Via Human Rights Without Frontiers
Human Rights Groups Face Global Crackdown – Women’s Programs
Laws affecting
funding, requiring registration and prohibiting protest are among controls that
are making it difficult for NGOs and other campaign groups
Women
hold a banner as they shout during a protest against the new law to regulate
non-governmental organisations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in July. Photograph:
Pring Samrang/Reuters
By
Harriet Sherwood
26 August 2015 - Human
rights organisations and campaign groups are facing their biggest
crackdown in a generation as a wave of countries pass restrictive laws and
curtail activity. Almost half the world’s states have implemented controls that
affect tens of thousands of organisations across the globe.
Over the past
three years, more than 60 countries have passed or drafted laws that curtail
the activity of non-governmental and civil society organisations. Ninety-six
countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity, in
what the Carnegie
Endowment calls a “viral-like spread of new laws” under which
international aid groups and their local partners are vilified, harassed,
closed down and sometimes expelled.
NGO’S IN CHINA
FEAR CLAMPDOWN WITH PLANNED INCREASED SECURITY CONTROLS
Proposed
new law could lead to harassment and arrest of local workers, restrictions or
expulsion for foreigners, and funding difficulties
James Savage, of Amnesty
International, says: “This global wave of restrictions has a
rapidity and breadth to its spread we’ve not seen before, that arguably
represents a seismic shift and closing down of human rights space not seen in a
generation.
“There are new
pieces of legislation almost every week – on foreign funding, restrictions in
registration or association, anti-protest laws, gagging laws. And,
unquestionably, this is going to intensify in the coming two to three years.
You can visibly watch the space shrinking.”
Among countries
that have recently cracked down on NGO and civil society activity are:
• India The government
labelled the environmental NGO Greenpeace as “anti-national”, blocking its bank
accounts, deporting foreign workers and preventing local staff from travelling
abroad. Licences for more than 13,000 organisations have been revoked for
alleged violations of a law on foreign funding.
• China Under a new law,
NGOs will be required to register with the police and
obtain approval to carry out activities, and submit annual activity plans and
budgets to a supervisory unit.
• Russia “Undesirable”
international NGOs can be shut down. In July, the Washington-based National
Endowment for Democracy became the first organisation to be banned under the new
law.
• Egypt Sweeping new
legislation on “terrorist entities” could encompass human rights and
civil society organisations. NGOs are already required to register with the
government.
• Uganda A
government-appointed board will have power to reject or dissolve NGOs and civil
society organisations. Harsh penalties – including imprisonment – await individuals who
violate a law enacted in April.
• Cambodia A new law
requires registration and annual reports to be filed with
the government. NGOs can be disbanded if their activities “jeopardise peace,
stability and public order or harm the national security, national unity,
culture and traditions of Cambodian society”.
Tom Carothers, of
the Carnegie Endowment, says: “Big countries that have been the drivers of this
[crackdown] have continued to lead the way – and smaller countries are
following their lead.” Restrictive measures are both formal, in the form of
legislation, and informal – harassment, intimidation, demonisation,
bureaucratic burdens. “Just counting NGO laws doesn’t quite give you the full
picture.”
Uganda: NGO Bill Aims to Tighten Control on Civil Society
New
Uganda legislation to ‘regulate’ non-governmental organisations is being seen
as an attempt to tighten control over their activities and curb dissent
The causes of
increasing restrictions are complex, say organisations that monitor civil
society activity, but broadly fall into three categories.
First is the shift
in political power away from the west, the main source of funding for domestic
civil society groups and the base for most big international NGOs. At the end
of the cold war, the US and other western countries stepped in to assist newly
democratising countries and burgeoning grassroots organisations.
But, more
recently, many governments in the developing and post-communist world have
pushed back against what they see as western interference. “This is the end of
the post-cold war period in which [the west] felt that liberal democracy and
western concepts of human rights were spreading around the world, to a period
in which there’s a relativisation of political values and the questioning of a
common narrative,” says Carothers.
Second,
governments have woken up to the power of civil society – particularly after
pro-democracy uprisings in former communist states and the revolutionary wave
that swept through the Middle East.
“In most countries
where leaders don’t allow a lot of pluralism or democracy, they’ve learned to
tame opposition political parties,” Carothers says. “But the deepest fear of
repressive governments is that they wake up in the morning, open the shutters
of the presidential palace, and look out to find 100,000 citizens in the square
saying ‘enough!’. That’s scary and uncontrollable,” particularly, Carothers
adds, when coupled with technological skill in harnessing the power of social
media to organise and spread messages.
Once laws come in,
it’s very difficult to repeal them
The third cause of
the NGO crackdown is the proliferation of counter-terrorism measures – often
promoted by the west – that sweep civil society organisations into their
embrace, either inadvertently or deliberately. Legitimate measures to curb
funding of and money-laundering by terrorist organisations often have a
debilitating effect on NGOs.
This is affecting
civil society in the west itself, and has consequences around the world, say
campaigners. Savage says states such as the UK and US that have been supportive
of NGOs and been human rights defenders are, because of the practices they are
introducing in their own states, undermining their ability to have positive
influence and push back at restrictions that are “much graver” in places such
as Russia
and Egypt. “That’s a very worrying new trend,” he says.
The result,
Carothers says, is an “asphyxiation of independent space – fewer voices,
self-censorship, closing down of organisations”.
High-profile
global organisations with strong reputations, such as Amnesty International,
have greater protection from the worst effects of the crackdown – although
Greenpeace was targeted in India, and Save The Children was temporarily expelled from Pakistan.
But, according to
Poonam Joshi of the Fund for Global Human Rights, the effect on
domestic NGOs and civil society groups can be paralysing. “You see
organisations go very quiet, no one wants to rock the boat. And many face a new
bureaucratic burden that affects their operational capacity.”
In response, the
UN has appointed Maina Kiai as a special rapporteur to focus on freedom of
expression and assembly. The EU organised a global forum of more than 200 civil
society participants last December. Development branches of western
governments, foundations and global NGOs are training and advising local groups
on how to respond to new restrictions. Amnesty International has identified
defending NGOs and human rights campaigners as one of its five strategic goals,
and will launch a global campaign next year.
But reversing the
trend is challenging. “Once laws come in, it’s very difficult to repeal them,”
says Joshi. “This is an uphill struggle, but a critical one.”
Countries in the
Spotlight
The new assault on
NGOs has intensified principally in countries such as China,
Russia and central Asia, where notions of democracy range from primitive to
non-existent. But, worryingly, an array of democracies have joined the list.
Israel
Israeli NGOs
critical of the government – in particular the country’s continued occupation
of the Palestinian territories – are facing severe new restrictions amid a
toxic political climate on the right that has sought to label them as
disloyal.A draft law seeks to cut off foreign funding by introducing a tax and
labelling NGOs with external finance as “foreign agents receiving funds from
foreign governments to continue their work.
Some of Israel’s
best-known human rights groups – including B’Tselem and Breaking
the Silence, an organisation of former soldiers that highlights
alleged military human rights abuses – are likely to be affected.
The threatened new
law comes as Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister and a member of
the prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, ordered Israeli
officials “to create a diplomatic dialogue about Israel, putting a red line
around the activities of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] organisations
that support the boycott of Israel, working for the [Palestinian] right of
return, or slander IDF [Israel Defence Force] soldiers and de-legitimise IDF
soldiers”.
Although human
rights NGOs have long been a target for criticism on the right, that has
increased since the 2014 Gaza conflict.
The new “foreign
agents” bill, introduced into the Knesset in June, would require any
organisation that receives more than $50,000 (£32,000) from a “foreign
political entity” to be defined as a “foreign organisation” and pay tax on that
funding – a move critics say would in effect remove funding for the groups.
The law would also
see an end to any cooperation between government ministries and “foreign agent”
groups, while NGOs would be required to be labelled as “foreign agent” on every
document, web page or publication.
Yehuda Shaul, a
founder of Breaking the Silence, traced the campaign against such groups to the
aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza war in 2008-09. “The bottom line is
that this is a way of trying to discredit organisations and people who have
different agendas to government. It’s a smear campaign.”
Sarit Michaeli of
B’Tselem, speaking in a personal capacity, says: “B’Tselem has always been the
target of political attacks by the right and settlers. While, in the past, the
criticism was led by rightwing NGOs related to the government, now it is the
government involved in these attacks.
“Regardless of what law emerges I think feature of this process – starting off
with extremely draconian proposals for legislations – is that it tires out the
resistance. You create a toxic and vitriolic climate where you have parts of
the media depicting NGOs as traitors and leftists.
“It is damaging
and creates a chilling effect in media and public. It is a scare tactic to
frighten people into keeping their mouths shut. In that sense, it is very
effective.”
Peter Beaumont in
Jerusalem
Ecuador
Pachamama,
an organisation that supports indigenous groups and campaigns for the
conservation of biodiversity, was one of the first to feel the force of the
clampdown on NGOs and civil society organisations by the government of
President Rafael Correa.
A few months after
executive decree 16 was issued in June 2013, Pachamama was closed down for
having violated the order, in what Mario Melo, the foundation’s lawyer, calls a
“tainted and invalid administrative process where Pachamama wasn’t given the
right to defend itself”.
Pachamama had
provided technical information to the Sarayaku people about the effect of
drilling for oil, an act that Melo says led to “some unease among those who
encourage extractive activities without any respect for human and nature’s
rights”.
The official
justification was that Pachamama, which received some US funding, was
interfering with public policies that undermined internal or external state
security that “might affect public peace”, as the International
Journal of Not-for-Profit Law reported.
Last September,
the pro-democracy foundation Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung closed its Ecuadorian
offices because of “the increase of control and influence of the government in
Quito, in the political work of foundations and non-governmental
organisations”.
And Yasunidos,
which advocates for the protection of Amazonian territories, has also reported
being a target of government pressure. Last December, members of the group
joined the Climatic Convoy, an activist bus en route from Mexico to an
environmental summit in Lima. The bus was impounded by Ecuadorian police, and
its passengers had to continue their journey in another vehicle.
In August, Correa
signed some modifications to executive decree 16. NGOs and civil society
organisations are no longer required to declare details of foreign funding.
But, according to Fundamedios, which campaigns for freedom of expression, the
modified decree maintains restrictions to freedom of assembly and allows public
servants to decide, according to unpublished criteria, whether an organisation
violates the law.
Marcela
Ribadeneira in Quito
Hungary
Viktor Orbán,
Hungary’s populist prime minister, has called for the monitoring of certain
“foreign-funded civil society organisations” that he describes as “agents of
foreign powers”.
The targeted NGOs
– referred to as “the dirty 13” in pro-government media, and including
Transparency International, the Civil Liberties Union and the Roma Press Centre
– received letters demanding two years of financial and administrative
documentation within one week.
Veronika Móra of
Ökotárs, the main distributor of Norwegian grants, says: “The situation
escalated quickly, from a media campaign, to administrative harassment, and
then to a raid on our offices and, finally, criminal accusations. Our offices
were raided in early September, which a court later ruled illegal, due to a
lack of reasonable suspicion.”
The authorities
also interviewed organisations that provide services to the NGOs. “So far they
have not uncovered a single irregularity,” Móra says.
In January, a
Budapest court upheld a complaint from Ökotárs that the raid of its office had
been unlawful. “Of course, the public prosecutor rejected our complaint, but
the court overturned that decision. I was pleasantly surprised as this proves
that Hungary’s judiciary is still independent,” Móra says.
The Hungarian tax
authority is conducting inspections at seven NGOs, including several of the
so-called dirty 13, and has attempted to freeze the tax accounts of the four
NGOs that disburse the Norwegian grants, a move that would render them
incapable of operation, and one that Ökotárs has so far blocked. “A judge sent
one of these cases to the constitutional court and a decision is expected in
September or October,” Móra says.
Dan Nolan in Budapest