The Year in Review

In the face of accelerating oppression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela and beyond, our work at CIVICUS to support civil society’s quest to a create an equal, just, peaceful and sustainable world remains more needed than ever. Over the past year, civil society has been tested by a series of multiple and worsening crises. Wars conducted without heed to the rules, governance devoid of democratic principles, surges in discrimination against women and excluded groups, greed-induced climate change and environmental degradation and economic deprivation in an age of excess are threatening to turn back decades of hard-won progress achieved by civil society.

Closing civic space is making civil society’s struggles harder. Civic space is in its worst state since we started systematically monitoring it in 2018, as reflected in a recent CIVICUS Monitor trend analysis report. There are serious civic space restrictions in close to 120 countries, and only around two per cent of people live in countries with open civic space. Intimidation, disruption of protests and arrests of protesters are among the most documented violations, with climate, democracy and environmental activists and LGBTQI+ people and women most in the firing line.

2023 was the hottest year on record, but climate activists are increasingly being criminalised, including by states that used to respect the right to protest. Conflict-related deaths have reached their highest level in decades, with humanitarian workers working to alleviate suffering and journalists trying to tell the unvarnished truth deliberately targeted. And as more countries close civic space, exiled activists are playing an increasingly important role in sustaining demands for democracy and human rights – but transnational repression is on the rise.

Still, there is reason for hope. We listened to civil society activists and organisations affected by and responding to today’s major challenges to inform the analysis presented in our 2024 State of Civil Society Report, and in our rolling commentary initiative, CIVICUS Lens. These many conversations show that there is a highly resilient civil society that has managed to hold the line and make a real difference.

In the face of anti-rights backlash, civil society continues to score victories, including the decriminalisation of same-sex relations in Dominica and Namibia and the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Greece and Thailand. Civil society is mobilising against gender-based violence, raising awareness and demanding policies to make it stop. Where regression has deepened, civil society is expressing solidarity, providing support and prioritising the safety of people under attack. Civil society continues to push for elections to take place in free and fair conditions, for votes to be properly counted and for election winners to govern in the interests of everyone.

Civil society remains a vital source of hope for the world’s beleaguered and oppressed people. There’s an urgent need to end restrictions and empower civil society to play its part in everything from building peace and tackling climate change to making progress on major international agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals.

We’re doing our bit to make that happen. Our #StandAsMyWitness campaign contributed to the release of former prosecutor Virginia Laparra in Guatemala, and through the Crisis Response Fund, we provided 29 advocacy and resilience grants to support responses to civic space restrictions. As part of this work, we stepped up our advocacy with funders, urging them to provide resources that connect with the realities faced by human rights defenders (HRDs) and communities working at the local level. We also launched a one-year Donor Transformation Challenge to encourage funders to dismantle outdated practices and mindsets and systems of oppression, starting with five principles to make locally led development meetings more inclusive. This led to over 30 commitments.

Our Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI), which aims to strengthen online access and security for grassroots civil society groups, began with an intensive onboarding process, including the identification of regional hubs and the organisation of the 2024 Digital Action Lab. We are now starting to provide tailored coaching, networking opportunities and funding to implement digital solutions.

Alongside a civil society partner network, we launched Local Leadership Labs (LLL), an initiative to create spaces where local civil society can drive the development of context-appropriate policies and solutions alongside other key groups and decision-makers. We also launched a multi-year programme to strengthen member-led networks.

At the United Nations (UN) in Geneva and New York, we participated in high-level discussions that included the perspectives of global south civil society and supported grassroots partner activists and organisations to speak for themselves. Ahead of the 46th and 47th sessions of the Human Rights Council’s (HRC) Universal Periodic Review (UPR), we supported submissions reporting on extreme civic space restrictions and making recommendations for improvement in nine countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Qatar and Vietnam. We contributed to several advocacy statements in response to country-specific risks and violations, and supported DefendDefenders to host a global consultation with the outgoing and incoming Special Rapporteurs on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association (FoAA).

In a year where global governance institutions repeatedly failed to do their job when they were needed most, we redoubled our efforts to promote reforms to democratise the UN and create greater civil society space in its mechanisms. We advanced our demands for better civil society participation through the UNMute Civil Society initiative and provided inputs to the Pact for the Future. We helped launch the 1 for 8 billion campaign to ensure an open, transparent, inclusive and merit-based process to select the next UN Secretary-General, who should be a woman and a feminist. We continued to promote thinking on the changes needed to make global governance more democratic, effective and robust as part of the ENSURED research initiative.

During the year, CIVICUS continued to evolve to meet today’s challenges, with a growing membership, innovative new programmes backed by an expanded range of funders that have enhanced our financial resilience, refined internal processes and a diverse staff of over 80 spread across more than 30 countries. All of this has been achieved under the leadership of Lysa John as Secretary General. Lysa transitioned out of CIVICUS following the end of her six-year term in September 2024, with the thanks and appreciation of board, staff and members. The board has asked Claire Nylander and Mandeep Tiwana to assume joint interim leadership as the search for a new Secretary General takes place.

The work will continue. The world may be in an alarming state, but it would be much worse were it not for civil society. At CIVICUS we believe the only way out of current crises is by listening to, working with and empowering civil society – and we’re working hard to make that happen.