Digital Democracy at a Crossroads. Key Takeaways from RigthsCon2025

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Opinion

RIO DE JANEIRO / ABUJA, Apr 7 2025 (IPS) – In an increasingly digital world, democratic practices are evolving to encompass new forms of participation. Digital democracy – the use of technology to enhance civic action, movement building and access to information – has become a crucial force in shaping local and global political landscapes.

As digital spaces become central to public discourse, civil society’s work is crucial to ensure these spaces remain accessible, open, participatory and resistant to disinformation, censorship and repression.

RightsCon 2025, recently held in Taiwan, offered an opportunity to discuss the current challenges and opportunities at the intersection of tech and human rights.

The digital democracy dilemma

Internet access has expanded among excluded communities, providing new opportunities for civic action and organising for historically excluded communities. But at the same time there’s increasing use of digital surveillance, censorship and algorithmic manipulation by governments and companies with the aim of suppressing dissent and controlling public discourse.

In 2023, the last year for which full data is available, internet penetration in low-income countries grew by three per cent, but this came alongside a record decline in global electoral integrity, with state-backed disinformation campaigns influencing elections in at least 30 countries. This means there’s an urgent need for policies that both enhance digital inclusion and safeguard civic freedoms from technological threats, particularly given that AI use is growing.

Civil society is calling for a global regulatory framework that ensures tech is beneficial for all, while facing the challenge of tech-facilitated attacks on civic freedoms. At the same time, civil society resourcing is shrinking and stigmatising narratives from authoritarian governments spread by tech are on the rise. Meanwhile – as CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report outlines – big-tech corporations focus on protecting their political and profit agendas. This makes spaces for convening and deliberation like RightsCon more vital than ever.

What next?

A global framework is crucial to ensure technology serves the public good and contributes to a more inclusive and equitable society. As digital technologies become deeply embedded in every aspect of governance and civic space, as well as cultural and belief systems, the risks of fragmented digital policies and regulations grow, leading to inconsistent mechanisms for protection and unequal access across regions. This fragmentation can significantly increase exposure to disinformation, exploitation and surveillance, particularly for traditionally excluded and vulnerable groups.

The Global Digital Compact (GDC) agreed at last year’s UN Summit of the Future represents the kind of comprehensive, multilateral framework civil society should advocate for. By fostering global cooperation, the GDC aims to establish shared principles for digital governance that prioritise human rights, democratic values and inclusive access to digital tools.

Through international bodies and cross-sector collaborations – such as those held at RightsCon – civil society can contribute towards shaping this framework, ensuring that civil society, governments and the private sector, including tech companies, work together to create a cohesive and accountable approach to digital governance.

Challenges and opportunities

Follow-up to the GDC must address a wide range of challenges, including digital access and inclusion. The existing digital ecosystem hinders equitable participation in democratic processes and efforts to realise human rights. There’s a need to close digital divides through targeted investments in education, digital skills and infrastructure, ensuring that everyone, regardless of geography or socioeconomic status, can access the tools needed to participate fully in shaping society. Civil society’s work here must be locally led, putting communities’ needs at the heart of advocacy and focusing on curating spaces for consultation and participation.

Another critical challenge is the intersection of government digitalisation and civic engagement. E-governance and online public services offer the potential for greater transparency, efficiency and participation, but they also introduce risks for privacy and security, reinforcing longstanding structural injustices such as racism and gender discrimination. Guidelines are needed to ensure transparency and accountability in digital governance while protecting the right to privacy. Polices need to enable the use of digital tools to fight and prevent corruption and ensure governments are held accountable.

And then there are the complex issues of AI governance. As AI technologies rapidly evolve, there come growing threats of algorithmic biases, a lack of transparency and the manipulation of public discourse and information ecosystems. Robust ethical standards for AI are needed that prioritise human rights and democratic values.

From the manipulation of public opinion, efforts to distort electoral outcomes and the generation of false narratives that can incite violence and social unrest, disinformation has many negative impacts on democracy. Evidence has repeatedly shown that in countries where politicians intensively use disinformation tactics, people’s trust in public institutions and democratic processes wanes and civic participation, a critical ingredient for democratic progress, falls. Conversations during RightsCon 2025 emphasised that civil society must engage with governments and regional and global institutions to help develop policies that regulate how information is managed in the digital age while working to improve media literacy and fact-checking initiatives.

The added value of civil society lies in its ability to act as a convener, broker and watchdog, and an advocate with and for traditionally excluded voices. Civil society is key in pushing for the inclusion of strong data protection laws, digital rights protections and regulations that curb the unchecked power of tech companies, where many grey areas for accountability remain underexplored. Working alongside governments and the private sector, civil society can lead the way in developing policies that safeguard democratic values, enhance accountability and ensure technology remains a tool for positive societal change. Through collective advocacy and partnership, civil society can drive a vision of a truly inclusive and ethical digital future.

Digital democracy and the challenges it faces aren’t national issues but global ones. Disinformation, cyberattacks and the erosion of digital rights transcend borders. More grounded international solidarity and cooperation is needed to create and enforce standards that protect online civic space and rights. The GDC must be supported and made more robust as a global framework for digital governance that upholds human rights, promotes transparency and ensures accountability.

Initiatives like the Digital Democracy Initiative should be championed in recognition of the unique role society plays in monitoring, analysing and challenging threats to digital democracy. It’s never been more crucial to enable and amplify civil society action in the face of global democratic decline amid an increasingly digital age.

Carolina Vega is Innovation Quality Management Lead at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance. Chibuzor Nwabueze is Programme and Network Coordinator for CIVICUS’s Digital Democracy Initiative.

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‘Energy Transfer’s Lawsuit Against Greenpeace Is an Attempt to Drain Our Resources and Silence Dissent’

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Apr 4 2025 (IPS) –  

CIVICUS speaks with Daniel Simons, Senior Legal Counsel Strategic Defence for Greenpeace International, about the lawsuit brought by an oil and gas company against Greenpeace and its broader implications for civil society. Greenpeace is a global network of environmental organisations campaigning on issues such as climate change, disarmament, forests, organic farming and peace.

Daniel Simons

In March, a North Dakota jury ruled that Greenpeace in the USA and Greenpeace International should pay damages of over US$660 million to Energy Transfer, which filed lawsuits alleging that Greenpeace instigated resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017 and caused operational disruptions and financial losses. The protests were led by Indigenous communities, particularly the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and focused on water protection and tribal rights. Energy Transfer claims the pipeline was properly regulated and provides economic benefits. Civil society has condemned the legal action as a SLAPP – a strategic lawsuit against public participation – designed to silence criticism. Greenpeace is appealing.

What prompted Energy Transfer to take legal action against Greenpeace?

The route of the Dakota Access Pipeline crosses underneath the Missouri River a short distance from the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In April 2016, tribal members set up prayer encampments to express their opposition to the construction. They worried that sites of cultural importance would be damaged, and that the pipeline might contaminate the river, the Tribe’s water source.

Energy Transfer took a number of provocative actions. It sued the Tribe’s chairperson and other participants in the Indigenous resistance, and not long after, bulldozed an area less than 24 hours after the Tribe had filed a declaration in court stating there were burial grounds and resources of cultural significance in the area. These events coincided with a huge growth in attention for and attendance at the camp.

Energy Transfer alleges that the Greenpeace defendants were somehow the masterminds, coming in and secretly organising everything that happened during the Standing Rock protests, and that this included trespassing, property damage and creating public nuisance. The company also accuses the Greenpeace defendants of defamation, complaining about nine statements in particular. Additionally, Energy Transfer claims Greenpeace’s actions delayed the refinancing of the pipeline’s construction loan, causing financial harm to the company.

What was Greenpeace’s actual involvement in the protests and its relationship with Indigenous communities?

Greenpeace – including Greenpeace Inc and Greenpeace Fund, both based in the USA, and Greenpeace International, a Dutch foundation – played only a limited role in the protests. Greenpeace Inc had some connections to the Indigenous communities at Standing Rock; as I understand it, the relationship was respectful but not extensive.

Greenpeace Inc supported the protests by funding five trainers from an independent Indigenous network to provide training on non-violent direct action for two weeks, conducting supply drives for the camps, providing short-term staff mainly to help with preparing the camp for winter and donating some lock boxes that protesters could use to form a human chain, although no evidence suggests they were ever used. It also published articles and co-signed two letters to banks containing the nine statements Energy Transfer now claims are defamatory. These statements had already been widely reported by media and United Nations bodies before Greenpeace’s involvement.

According to an Indigenous activist who testified in court, Greenpeace Inc was present but followed the lead of people on the ground. Its involvement was so minimal that most tribal nations at Standing Rock wouldn’t even have been aware of it. The activist described claims that Greenpeace controlled the resistance as ‘paternalistic’ and emphasised that many Indigenous leaders had the ability to run a complex movement and engage with media themselves.

Greenpeace International’s only relevant action was signing an open letter led by the Dutch civil society organisation BankTrack, alongside 500 other organisations. Meanwhile, Greenpeace Fund had no involvement in the Standing Rock resistance, yet Energy Transfer argues that sharing resources such as office space and contact details with Greenpeace Inc makes it liable.

How is Greenpeace defending itself and what impact has the lawsuit had on its operations?

We argue that Energy Transfer has greatly exaggerated our role in the protests and is attempting to recover costs that are all unrelated to our actions. There is just no evidence of any link between the Greenpeace defendants’ activities and the damages the company claims. And there is certainly no link to any act of violence or property damage.

Greenpeace International has also taken legal action in the Netherlands, using the new European Union anti-SLAPP directive for the first time to challenge what we view as an attempt to drain our resources and silence dissent. Defending ourselves has required significant financial and personnel resources. While Greenpeace has the capacity to fight back, there are concerns that such lawsuits could deter smaller or less experienced organisations from challenging the powerful US oil and gas industry – which appears to be one of the goals of this case.

What are the next steps in the legal proceedings and how do you see this case resolving?

While the jury has reached a verdict that decided the Greenpeace defendants must pay US$666 million for defamation and the other claims, the judge still needs to enter a final judgment. There are obvious issues with jury verdict and we are in the process of challenging those. Greenpeace Inc and Greenpeace Fund have already announced they will appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Greenpeace International is pursuing its case against Energy Transfer in the District Court of Amsterdam, with the first procedural hearing scheduled for 2 July.

The battle is far from over. Greenpeace is determined to defeat these claims and hold Energy Transfer accountable for filing repeated SLAPP suits. This fight extends beyond Greenpeace – it concerns the protection of freedom of expression. An attack on one is an attack on all, and we hope civil society will stand with us.

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SEE ALSO
Italy: ‘Authoritarian tendencies manifest themselves in efforts to control information and stifle dissent’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Ilaria Masinara 22.Jun.2024
Europe: ‘Members states must introduce national anti-SLAPP legislation to protect public watchdogs’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Francesca Borg Constanzi 21.Mar.2024
How SLAPPs undermine democracy: a case study of the USA CIVICUS 02.Jul.2018

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Civil Society’s Reform Vision Gains Urgency as the USA Abandons UN Institutions

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Opinion

Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

LONDON, Apr 2 2025 (IPS) – Today’s multiple and connected crises – including conflicts, climate breakdown and democratic regression – are overwhelming the capabilities of the international institutions designed to address problems states can’t or won’t solve. Now US withdrawal from global bodies threatens to worsen a crisis in international cooperation.

The second Trump administration quickly announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO), terminated its cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council, walked out of negotiations on a global tax treaty and imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court officials.

Although the USA has sometimes been an obstructive force, including by repeatedly blocking Security Council resolutions on Israel, global institutions lose legitimacy when powerful states opt out. While all states are formally equal in the UN, the reality is that the USA’s decisions to participate or quit matter more than most because it’s a superpower whose actions have global implications. It’s also the biggest funder of UN institutions, even if it has a poor record in paying on time.

As it stands, the USA’s WHO withdrawal will take effect in January 2026, although the decision could face a legal challenge and Trump could rescind his decision if the WHO makes changes to his liking, since deal-making powered by threats and brinkmanship is how he does business. But if withdrawal happens, the WHO will be hard hit. The US government is the WHO’s biggest contributor, providing around 18 per cent of funding. That’s a huge gap to fill, and it’s likely the organisation will have to cut back its work. Progress towards a global pandemic treaty, under negotiation since 2021, may be hindered.

It’s possible philanthropic sources will step up their support, and other states may help fill the gap. The challenge comes if authoritarian states take advantage of the situation by increasing their contributions and expect greater influence in return. China, for example, may be poised to do so.

That’s what happened when the first Trump administration pulled out of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). China filled the vacuum by increasing its contributions to become UNESCO’s biggest annual funder. Presumably not coincidentally, a Chinese official became its deputy head, while China was able to block Taiwan’s attempts to join. It was out of concern about this growing influence that the Biden administration took the USA back into UNESCO in 2023; that decision could now be reversed, as Trump has claimed UNESCO is biased against the USA and ordered a review.

The Human Rights Council may be less immediately affected because the USA isn’t currently a member, its term having ended at the close of 2024. It rejoined in 2021 after Trump pulled out in 2018, and had already made the unusual decision not to seek a second term, likely because this would have provoked a backlash over its support for Israel. Apart from its relationship with Israel, however, during its term under the Biden administration the USA was largely recognised as playing a positive role in the Council’s business. If it refuses to cooperate, it deprives US citizens of a vital avenue of redress.

The USA’s actions may also inspire other states with extremist leaders to follow suit. Argentina’s President Milei, a keen Trump admirer, has imitated him by announcing his country’s departure from the WHO. Political leaders in Hungary and Italy have discussed doing the same. Israel followed the USA in declaring it wouldn’t engage with the Human Rights Council. For its own reasons, in February authoritarian Nicaragua also announced its withdrawal from the Council following a report critical of its appalling human rights record.

It could be argued that institutions like the Human Rights Council and UNESCO, having survived one Trump withdrawal, can endure a second. But these shocks come at a different time, when the UN system is already more fragile and damaged. Now the very idea of multilateralism and a rules-based international order is under attack, with transactional politics and hard-nosed national power calculations on the rise. Backroom deals resulting from power games are replacing processes with a degree of transparency aimed at achieving consensus. The space for civil society engagement and opportunities for leverage are in danger of shrinking accordingly.

Real reform needed

Revitalising the UN may seem a tall order when it’s under attack, but as CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report outlines, civil society has ideas about how to save the UN by putting people at its heart. The UNMute Civil Society initiative, backed by over 300 organisations and numerous states, makes five calls to improve civil society’s involvement: using digital technologies to broaden participation, bridging digital divides by focusing on connectivity for the most excluded, changing procedures and practices to ensure effective and meaningful participation, creating an annual civil society action day as an opportunity to assess progress on civil society participation and appointing a UN civil society envoy.

Each of these ideas is practical and could open up space for greater reforms. A UN civil society envoy could, for example, promote best practices in civil society participation across the UN and ensure a diverse range of civil society is involved in the UN’s work.

Civil society is also calling for competitive Human Rights Council elections, with a civil society role in scrutinising candidates, and limits on Security Council veto powers. And as time approaches to pick a new UN Secretary-General, civil society is mobilising the 1 for 8 billion campaign, pushing for an open, transparent, inclusive and merit-based selection process. The office has always been held by a man, and the call is for the UN to make history by appointing a feminist woman leader.

These would all offer small steps towards making the UN system more open, democratic and accountable. There’s nothing impossible or unimaginable about these ideas, and times of crisis create opportunities to experiment. States that want to reverse the tide of attacks on international cooperation and revitalise the UN should work with civil society to take them forward.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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Global Climate Action Progressing, but Speed and Scale Still Lacking

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Climate Action

Former UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres praised the role of small island states in maintaining the integrity of international climate agreements but said the world was far behind and said that the decarbonisation of the global economy is by now irreversible with or without the craziness in the United States.

Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres, speaking during a press briefing with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network on March 27. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres, speaking during a press briefing with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network on March 27. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

Mar 31 2025 (IPS) – 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement. One of its chief architects, Christiana Figueres, says the world is heading in the right direction but warns that urgent action is needed to close critical gaps.

The pact, adopted in 2015 by 195 nations, set out to limit global warming to “well below 2°C” above pre-industrial levels, striving for 1.5°C. But in 2024, the world shattered records as the hottest year ever, surpassing that crucial threshold.

Speaking at a press briefing with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network on March 27, Figueres said while technology and investment are advancing, the world is not moving fast enough.

“We’re far behind,” she said. “We have very clear data points of all of the technologies that are exponentially growing on both sides of the market – the supply side as well as the demand – and we can see that all of that is moving, as well as investment. That definitely defines the direction of travel and the decarbonisation of the global economy is by now irreversible with or without the craziness in the United States. What still is not at the level that we should have is speed and scale.”

A co-founder of Global Optimism, an organisation focused on hope and action in the face of climate change, Figueres emphasised the urgency of the crisis while highlighting the global capacity to address it.

While one in five people globally already experience climate impacts daily, and climate-related costs rose to $320 billion last year, investment in clean technology is outpacing fossil fuels, she noted.

“We had last year two times the level of investment into clean technology versus fossil fuels and the prices continue to fall. Every year they fall even more and more. Solar prices last year fell by a whopping 35%. Electric vehicle batteries fell by 20%,” she said.

Figueres also spoke about the disproportionate burden placed on small island nations, which are already importing fossil fuels at the cost of up to 30% of their national budgets. “These islands are importing the poison that is directly threatening their survival,” she argued, stressing the need for renewable energy solutions like wind and hydro to replace fossil fuels.

The former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) also praised the role of small island states in maintaining the integrity of international climate agreements. “It’s not the size of the nation but the integrity of their position that matters,” she said, noting how these nations have consistently held larger emitters accountable.

Asked about the Paris Agreement’s architecture, Figueres defended its approach.

“The Paris Agreement is really strange in its legal bindingness. It is legally binding to all countries that have ratified it, but what is binding is the overall trajectory of decarbonisation to get to net zero by 2050. What is not binding is the level of the NDCs which are the nationally determined contributions that every country has to submit every 5 years and be held accountable against that,” she said, likening the agreement’s style to running a marathon, “the goal is clear, but the pace is up to each runner.”

Figueres says the COP process was designed in the early 1990s as a multilateral platform for countries to negotiate agreements aimed at addressing climate change collectively – something that was critical for establishing frameworks like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. She stressed that with agreements in place to guide global decarbonisation until 2050, the next phase of climate talks should focus on implementation rather than new negotiations.

“The implementation is mostly on the part of the private sector and the financial sector. Do  they need governments to support them? Absolutely, so what governments need to do is to put regulations, incentives, and tax credits in place to accelerate investment in the sectors that we know are going to address climate change and to give long-term certainty to the private sector so that they can do their planning, but those regulations, those incentives, and those tax breaks are not to be negotiated between countries. They are to be enacted nationally, domestically.”

With COP 30 approaching, Figueres urged countries to take a long-term view in their climate planning. “NDCs should align government and private sector ambitions with the next decade’s possibilities, not just the current technologies,” she said.

As host country Brazil prepares for the 2025 UN Climate Talks, Figueres called for a holistic approach to climate policy, linking energy, industry, and nature. She also cautioned against framing COP 30 as a “last chance”, emphasising that it should be seen as a milestone in a longer journey toward global climate goals.

2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement. One of its chief architects, Christiana Figueres says the world is heading in the right direction but warns that urgent action is needed to close critical gaps.

The pact, adopted in 2015 by 195 nations, set out to limit global warming to “well below 2°C” above pre-industrial levels, striving for 1.5°C. But in 2024, the world shattered records as the hottest year ever, surpassing that crucial threshold.

Speaking at a press briefing with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network on March 27, Figueres said while technology and investment are advancing, the world is not moving fast enough.

“We’re far behind,” she said. “We have very clear data points of all of the technologies that are exponentially growing on both sides of the market – the supply side as well as the demand – and we can see that all of that is moving, as well as investment. That definitely defines the direction of travel and the decarbonisation of the global economy is by now irreversible with or without the craziness in the United States. What still is not at the level that we should have is speed and scale.”

A co-founder of Global Optimism, an organisation focused on hope and action in the face of climate change, Figueres emphasised the urgency of the crisis while highlighting the global capacity to address it.

While one in five people globally already experience climate impacts daily, and climate-related costs rose to $320 billion last year, investment in clean technology is outpacing fossil fuels, she noted.

“We had last year two times the level of investment into clean technology versus fossil fuels and the prices continue to fall. Every year they fall even more and more. Solar prices last year fell by a whopping 35%. Electric vehicle batteries fell by 20%,” she said.

Figueres also spoke about the disproportionate burden placed on small island nations, which are already importing fossil fuels at the cost of up to 30% of their national budgets. “These islands are importing the poison that is directly threatening their survival,” she argued, stressing the need for renewable energy solutions like wind and hydro to replace fossil fuels.

The former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) also praised the role of small island states in maintaining the integrity of international climate agreements. “It’s not the size of the nation but the integrity of their position that matters,” she said, noting how these nations have consistently held larger emitters accountable.

Asked about the Paris Agreement’s architecture, Figueres defended its approach.

“The Paris Agreement is really strange in its legal bindingness. It is legally binding to all countries that have ratified it, but what is binding is the overall trajectory of decarbonisation to get to net zero by 2050. What is not binding is the level of the NDCs, which are the nationally determined contributions that every country has to submit every 5 years and be held accountable against that,” she said, likening the agreement’s style to running a marathon, “the goal is clear, but the pace is up to each runner.”

Figueres says the COP process was designed in the early 1990s as a multilateral platform for countries to negotiate agreements aimed at addressing climate change collectively – something that was critical for establishing frameworks like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. She stressed that with agreements in place to guide global decarbonisation until 2050, the next phase of climate talks should focus on implementation rather than new negotiations.

“The implementation is mostly on the part of the private sector and the financial sector. Do  they need governments to support them? Absolutely, so what governments need to do is to put regulations, incentives, and tax credits in place to accelerate investment in the sectors that we know are going to address climate change and to give long-term certainty to the private sector so that they can do their planning, but those regulations, those incentives, and those tax breaks are not to be negotiated between countries. They are to be enacted nationally, domestically.”

With COP 30 approaching, Figueres urged countries to take a long-term view in their climate planning. “NDCs should align government and private sector ambitions with the next decade’s possibilities, not just the current technologies,” she said.

As host country Brazil prepares for the 2025 UN Climate Talks, Figueres called for a holistic approach to climate policy, linking energy, industry, and nature. She also cautioned against framing COP 30 as a “last chance”, emphasising that it should be seen as a milestone in a longer journey toward global climate goals.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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How to Turn the Tide: Resisting the Global Assault on Gender Rights

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Opinion

Credit: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters via Gallo Images

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Mar 27 2025 (IPS) – This year’s session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), the world’s leading forum for advancing gender equality, confronted unprecedented challenges. With Saudi Arabia in the chair and anti-rights voices growing increasingly influential in the forum, the struggle to hold onto international commitments on gender equality intensified dramatically. On 8 March, International Women’s Day mobilisations also took on added urgency, with demonstrations from Istanbul to Buenos Aires focusing on resisting the multiple manifestations of gender rights regression being felt in communities worldwide.

CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report shows that hard-won women’s and LGBTQI+ rights are at risk, challenged by coordinated anti-rights movements that use gender as a political wedge issue. But it also provides abundant evidence that civil society is rising to the challenge.

Global regression

They call it ‘child protection’ in Russia, ‘family values’ in several Eastern European countries, ‘religious freedom’ in the USA, and ‘African traditions’ across the continent. The terminology shifts, but the objective is the same: halting progress towards gender equality and dismantling rights. Of course, it isn’t about differences in cultural values – it’s an orchestrated political strategy.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s system of gender apartheid has reached its brutal endpoint: women are effectively imprisoned in their homes, barred from education, work and public life, their voices literally silenced by prohibitions on singing or talking in public. Iranian authorities have gone to extreme lengths to maintain control over women’s bodies. In Iraq, lawmakers are considering lowering the minimum marriage age to just nine years old.

These extreme examples exist along a spectrum that includes Ghana’s parliament criminalising same-sex relations, Russia expanding ‘propaganda’ laws to prohibit any positive portrayal of LGBTQI+ identities, and Georgia – a country that says it wants to join the European Union – adopting Russian-style legislation restricting LGBTQI+ organisations under the cynical framing of ‘protecting minors’.

In the USA, Trump-appointed justices overturned constitutional abortion protections, triggering restrictions across numerous states. The second Trump administration has now reinstated the global gag rule, restricting international funding for organisations providing reproductive healthcare. The Guttmacher Institute projects this will deny 11.7 million women access to contraception, potentially causing 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,300 maternal deaths.

A coordinated transnational movement

Across Africa, there’s an intensifying wave of anti-LGBTQI+ legislation, often driven by political opportunism. Mali’s military junta passed a law criminalising homosexuality as part of its broader crackdown on rights. Ghana’s parliament passed a draconian ‘anti-LGBTQI+ bill’, while Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld the country’s harsh Anti-Homosexuality Act. In Kenya, a Family Protection Bill that would outlaw LGBTQI+ advocacy remains before parliament.

As recently seen at CSW, the ongoing backlash is transnational in nature. Anti-rights forces share tactics, funding and messaging across borders, with conservative foundations from the USA promoting restrictive legislation in Africa and Russian ideologues exporting their playbook to former Soviet states and beyond. US evangelical organisations and conservative think-tanks are a particularly influential source of anti-rights narratives and funding: they’ve funnelled millions of dollars into campaigns against reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ equality worldwide, while providing intellectual frameworks and legal strategies for adaption to local contexts from Poland to Uganda.

Victories against the odds

Against this daunting backdrop, civil society continues achieving remarkable victories through strategic resistance and persistence. In 2024, Thailand became Southeast Asia’s first country to legalise same-sex marriage, while Greece broke new ground as the first majority Orthodox Christian country to do so. France enshrined abortion rights in its constitution, creating a powerful bulwark against future threats.

A regional trend continued in the Caribbean, with civil society litigation successfully overturning colonial-era laws that criminalised homosexuality in Dominica. Colombia and Sierra Leone banned child marriage, while women’s rights groups in The Gambia defeated a bill that would have decriminalised female genital mutilation.

These successes share common elements: they’re the result of sustained, multi-year advocacy campaigns combining legal challenges, community mobilisation, strategic communications and international solidarity.

Take Thailand’s marriage equality victory. Success came partly through the campaign’s intersection with the youth-led democracy movement, which connected LGBTQI+ rights to broader aspirations for a fairer society. In Kenya, despite harsh anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric from political leaders, strategic litigation by civil society secured a court ruling preventing incitement to violence against LGBTQI+ people.

Even in the most repressive contexts, activists find ways to resist. Afghan women, denied basic rights to education and movement, have developed underground schools and created subtle forms of civil disobedience that maintain pressure without risking their lives. Along with their Iranian sisters, they continue to campaign for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime under international law.

The path forward: intersectionality and solidarity

Progress in realising rights is neither linear nor inevitable. Each advance triggers opposition, so every victory needs defence. To solidify and last, legal changes must be accompanied by social transformation – which is why civil society complements policy advocacy with public education, community organising and cultural engagement.

Advocacy is most effective when it embraces intersectionality, recognising how gender, sexuality, class, race, disability and migration status create overlapping forms of exclusion that need integrated responses. Feminist movements are increasingly centring the experiences of Black women, Indigenous women, women with disabilities and trans women.

Even where progress can feel elusive, civil society is playing a crucial role in keeping hope alive. Organisations defending women’s and LGBTQI+ rights are maintaining spaces where people are allowed to be their true selves, providing support services that nobody else will provide, documenting violations that would otherwise go unrecorded, keeping up the pressure on the authorities and building solidarity networks that sustain activists through difficult times.

International support for these efforts has never been more important. The USAID funding freeze highlights a troubling trend of shrinking resources for gender rights defenders at precisely the moment they’re needed most. This makes diversifying funding sources an urgent priority, with feminist philanthropists, progressive foundations and governments committed to gender equality needing to step up. More innovative funding mechanisms are required to rapidly respond to emergencies while sustaining the long-term work of movement building. Individuals have power: anyone can contribute directly to frontline organisations, amplify their voices on social media, challenge regressive narratives in their communities and demand that elected representatives prioritise gender equality domestically and in foreign policy. In the global struggle for fundamental rights, no one should be a spectator. The time for solidarity is now.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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Will UN be a Possible Target as US Goes on a Rampage?

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UNITED NATIONS, Mar 26 2025 (IPS) – The Trump administration, spearheaded by senior adviser Elon Musk, has been on a wild rampage: mass layoffs of government employees, gutting federal agencies, dismantling the Department of Education and USAID, defying a federal judge and threatening universities with drastic cuts in grants and contracts—decisions mostly engineered by the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Perhaps with more to come.

The cuts were best symbolized with an image of Musk wielding a heavy chainsaw aimed at slashing “wasteful spending”

But the layoffs and subsequent reversals– the on-again, off-again decisions– have triggered chaos in the nation’s capital.

And political outrage is fast becoming the norm.

Musk, the tech billionaire, who acts as a virtual Prime Minister to President Trump, has called on the U.S. to exit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations.

“I agree,” he wrote in response to a post from a right-wing political commentator, saying “it’s time” for the U.S. to leave NATO and the UN.”

The threat against the UN has been reinforced following a move by several Republican lawmakers who have submitted a bill on the U.S. exit from the U.N., claiming that the organization does not align with the Trump administration’s “America First” agenda.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/no-sane-country-would-stand-this-lawmakers-launch-effort-withdraw-u-s-from-united-nations

What’s next?

The abrogation of the 1947 US-UN Headquarters Agreement?

That 78-year-old agreement helped establish the world body in a former decrepit slaughter house in Turtle Bay New York.

The Agreement is an international treaty, and under international law, treaties are generally binding on the parties that sign them. However, the U.S. has a constitutional process for withdrawing from treaties.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal March 14, titled “The U.N. Is Ripping America Off in New York”, Eugene Kontorovich, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a professor at George Mason University School of Law, points out the U.S. offered to host the newly-created U.N. after World War II, amid a wave of optimism about the organization’s ability to prevent future wars.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated the land, and the headquarters was given an interstate-free loan from Washington that would be worth billions today.

The United Nations shall not be moved unless the headquarters district ceases to be used for that purpose, the agreement says. Some U.N. officials have taken this to mean the U.N. can’t be evicted.

“But the agreement is a treaty, and the default rule of international law is that treaties, unless they say otherwise, last as long as the parties wish. If the U.S. cancels the treaty, the entire arrangement disappears, nothing in the treaty’s text prohibits withdrawal. Indeed, had an irrevocable agreement been intended, (the US) Congress, which is needed to approve treaties, would not have allowed the agreement to pass without making it explicit”.

While the treaty refers to the “permanent” headquarters of the U.N., this simply means “durable.” Many international treaties use “permanent” in this way, to mean long-lasting, not eternal. The Permanent International Court of Justice lasted from 1922-46.

“Trump should reopen the 1947 agreement locating its headquarters. It was a terrible real-estate deal”, declared Kontorovich

Dr. Stephen Zunes, a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS removing the United Nations headquarters from the United States has long been advocated by the far right and generally dismissed as a fringe idea not to be taken seriously.

However, as the Trump administration has already demonstrated, even the most extreme ideologically-driven proposals can indeed end up being implemented as policy, he said.

“The United States has not always upheld its obligations under the treaty, such as in 1988 when the Reagan administration refused to allow PLO chairman Yasir Arafat to address the world body, resulting in the entire General Assembly relocating to Geneva to hear his speech”.

Removing the United Nations headquarters from the United States, he argued, “would symbolize the end of the global leadership we have had since the end of World War II when the victorious allies established the world body.”

Along with the Trump administration’s decision to disestablish the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Fulbright Program, and other symbols of American leadership internationally, it would end any semblance of the United States remaining a preeminent force in international cooperation.

At the same time, the United States has increasingly become an outlier when it comes to the international community rather than a leader or partner.

“This is true even under Democratic administrations, as indicated by Biden’s rogue positions in regard to Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinian statehood, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other UN institutions.”

Having the UN headquarters in a more neutral location may end up being for the best, said Dr Zunes, who has written extensively on the politics of the United Nations.

So far, the US has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), while it has warned that two other UN organizations “deserve renewed scrutiny”– the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—a warning seen as a veiled threat of US withdrawal from the two UN agencies.

Meanwhile, the United States has cut $377 million worth of funding to the UN reproductive and sexual health agency, UNFPA.

Giving an indication of UN agencies moving some of their functions out of the US, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters at a briefing last month: “We have been investing in Nairobi, creating the conditions for Nairobi to receive services that are now in more expensive locations”.

“And UNICEF will be transferring soon some of the functions to Nairobi. And UNFPA will be essentially moving to Nairobi. And I can give you many other examples of things that are being done and correspond to the idea that we must be effective and cost-effective,” he said.

Asked about the possible withdrawal of the US from the world body, Martin S. Edwards, Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, told IPS it would not be clear what the intent of this move would be.

In fact, what is certain, he pointed out, is that it would be a mistake of gigantic proportions. The Trump administration, solely to curry favor with some small fraction of its base, would be handing a huge diplomatic victory to China, who would not hesitate to jump at the chance to host the UN.

“And even this White House has to see that, so I don’t see this as advancing US interests in any form. On the contrary, had the White House thought the UN as unimportant, they wouldn’t have designated Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador,” he declared.

A report in the Washington Examiner last January said Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, and the US Ambassador-elect to the UN, has vowed to utilize her skills as a lawmaker to scrutinize the funding provided to the U.N. and cut the budget provided if necessary.

“As a member of Congress, I also understand deeply that we must be good stewards of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Stefanik said. “The U.S. is the largest contributor to the U.N. by far. Our tax dollars should not be complicit in propping up entities that are counter to American interests, antisemitic, or engaging in fraud, corruption, or terrorism.”

As the largest single contributor, the US currently pays 22% of the United Nations’ regular budget and 27% of the peacekeeping budget. Still, the US owes $1.5 billion to the UN’s regular budget.

And, between the regular budget, the peacekeeping budget, and international tribunals, the total amount the US owes is $2.8 billion.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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