Annual Plan Narrative 2024-2025

Table of Contents

SO 2: Coordinate targeted advocacy

We influence, build solidarity and foster policy change through:

  • Agenda setting: We engage with global governance institutions and processes with a focus on ensuring greater civil society participation and actions needed by UN member states to protect civic space and address civic space violations and linked human rights violations including grave abuses.
  • Advancing proposals to improve participation, representation, and access at the UN headquarters through the Unmute Civil Society Initiative, engaging with the Human Rights Council (HRC), diplomatic missions, special procedures, and other relevant UN bodies and processes such as Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of countries’ human rights records.
  • Regional advocacy: We support civil society’s engagement with international regional bodies such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
  • Our advocacy works through our campaigns and networks such as #StandAsMyWitness, Vuka! Coalition for Civic Action, the Consortium for Human Rights and Media Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (CHARM), Freedom of Peaceful Assembly (FoPA) Global Resource Hub and the Crisis Response Fund.

How we will measure progress:

Learning question:
In what ways is our targeted advocacy supporting groups, affected by both civic space restrictions and structural forms of discrimination, to create change in local contexts?

Proxy indicators: 
# of coordinated advocacy actions** successful in creating space for civil society.
Target: 22

Number of international agreements blocked, adopted, or improved.
Target: 5

** We use the number of Universal Periodic Review (UPR) submissions because they are integral to how we connect human rights defenders and national advocacy to international mechanisms.

CIVICUS added value in the UN Geneva system can be found in its connection and everyday work with a broad network of activists, human rights defenders and fellow CSOs. Many of them are part of the Human Rights Commission Network. For example, through our Freedom of Peaceful Assembly stream, we enabled a diverse group of activists. Six groups contributed to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association analysis of accountability for violations to FoPA.