Bibi van der Zee - Democracy campaigner: governments are scared of the participation revolution
The global pushback from governments
against civil society is ‘an emergency’, says the head of a worldwide network
of NGOs
Danny Sriskandarajah is
charged with the job of looking out for countries where governments are
cracking down on NGOs or on grassroots groups. Two years ago his organisation Civicus launched a monitor which tracks
threats or infringements of the right to freedom of association, freedom of
assembly and freedom of expression, both for grassroots, voluntary
organisations, and for the larger professionalised NGOs.
“In the last four
years things have changed so dramatically,” he says. “In 2013 we would be
issuing press statements or alerts about Russia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, countries
where you’d expect to see this sort of thing. But over the last few years we’ve
been issuing alarms about the UK, US, Hungary and Poland. What’s begun to
emerge is that we really think there is a global emergency around civil space,
that for a variety of reasons governments and sometimes non-state actors are going
out of their way to shut down the ability of citizens to collectively organise
and mobilise.”
There is a global
emergency around civil space. Red flags have been
flying for a couple of years now. Doug Rutzen, head of the International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law says:
“Since January 2012, more than 140 laws have been proposed or enacted by
governments in 65 countries around the world aimed at restricting the
registration, operation, and funding of NGOs.”
Alarm bells began to
seriously ring for Sriskandarajah when India moved to tighten up restrictions
on foreign funding for NGOs. In 2014 a leaked report by India’s Intelligence
Bureau had
accused NGOs of reducing India’s GDP; over the next year under prime
minister Narendra Modi, the government cracked down on foreign funding for
organisations like Greenpeace and the Ford Foundation. “This was a real wake
up call,” he says. “Firstly this was the world’s largest democracy, and a
country still in need financially of foreign aid. But the political arguments
the government was making around demonising civil society were being won
easily. Indian civil society just wasn’t responding at the political level to
challenge what the government was saying and doing.”
In the last couple of
years, he observes, the same pattern has been playing out in the west. In the UK
for example a number of moves by the government – “the lobbying act [which
limits the amount that charities can spend on political campaigning], gagging
clauses on NGOs, undercover surveillance by police officers, the well-documented
extra restrictions on muslim charities…” have come at the same time as a
sustained campaign
against aid by the right-wing press, and aid organisations have been oddly
unable to make the case for themselves... read more:
