Gina Romero: Restrictions affecting Right to Assembly and Youth Activism

You describe the shrinking of civic space today as an existential threat to the right of assembly and the right of association.

That is much more than a series of separate national crises of an authoritarian clampdown on civil and political rights in individual countries.

And you've sounded alarm about the compounding detrimental effects of securitization, surveillance, digital surveillance, but also the collapse of funding for independent civic activism, which are all operating simultaneously across regions.

So could you discuss how these factors are reinforcing each other in some of the countries that you have examined for your report?

What we are seeing right now, this existential threat, it's fueled by three global trends and several tactics that different actors, including governments and non-state actors, are using to curtail freedoms and rights.

The three trends in a nutshell are the backsliding in democracy, rise of authoritarianism, which at the core has a problem with allowing dissent to exist.

It could be political dissent, it could be social, cultural dissent.

This is the main factor that is harming the rights of assembly and of association.

The second trend is the increase on wars, occupations, genocides, and the recurrence use of violence to solve problems.

And then the third trend is deterioration of multilateralism.

So now that we have a reduction of democracy, an increasing of authoritarianism, an increasing of violence as a way of take decision, multilateral systems are not actually doing what they are meant to do, mediating conflicts and uphold institutions.

So those three trends are reinforced or are driven by several tactics that governments are using that together are creating a vacuum in which civil society and dissenting voices, including people that go to the streets to protest, are actually being completely curtailed to exercise their rights.

And these tactics are many.

The adoption of restricting laws, for example, to portray civil society organizations and other actors as foreign agent or enemies of the nation or traitors and so on.

What they do is to fuel narratives of these different actors to actually increase the rejection that society can give to them and make easy the criminalization of their work.

We also have the increase of surveillance, as you mentioned.

We are living in a world in which transnational crime has increased and is also being paired with a narrative that is increasingly creating different views on why society needs security and how the increase of security sometimes need to come, like in quotes, with the restriction of freedoms.

That is not true, but that is what the government sell to people.

They are also making people buy this idea of increasing the surveillance, increasing the persecution, even the online harassment for many different actors.

And all this is eroding the possibility to assemble, to exercise freedom of speech, and to associate, to go to the streets to protest, and so on.

So this is why it's an existential threat and why this is also chilling the new generations sometimes to act, but also is chilling citizens that now don't want to participate in different political activities because they are going to be surveilled or because they are going to be heavily repressed, which is happening worldwide.

worldwide.We come back to the restrictions and also the fear which these governments are inducing.

One of the instruments which you mentioned, the tactic I want to pick out so that we understand it a little better, is the term which you used foreign agents.

You've drawn a very interesting direct historical parallel between this foreign agent legislation that is being used by many authoritarian governments to delegitimize activists today and a decades-old law in Guatemala against communism.

Older repressive laws are being repackaged and rebranded across time and are being adapted to new context as authoritarian governments are increasingly borrowing these instruments also today from one another.