Cutting civil society’s lifeline The global spread of foreign agents laws

2004-2009 Early steps in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe

Long before Russia formalised the modern template for foreign agents laws that target civil society, and well before the surge in FARA enforcement from 2016 onwards, two African governments pioneered the use of restrictive legislation to constrain organisations receiving foreign funding. In 2004, Zimbabwe attempted to introduce a foreign agents law targeting international CSOs and local organisations that receive international funding with restrictions that would later become standard features of foreign agents laws worldwide. The ruling party passed a bill that would have banned foreign CSOs, but then President Robert Mugabe didn’t sign it into law.

The draft legislation, however, circulated among lawmakers in African countries and provided a blueprint for similar restrictive proposals, establishing key elements that would soon be repeated: restrictions on foreign funding, requirements for government approval of CSO activities and broad definitions of prohibited activities. The first successful effort to pass a law based on Zimbabwe’s template came in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia’s 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation effectively functioned as a foreign agents law, creating one of the world’s most restrictive civil society environments. Under this law, any CSO that received over 10 per cent of funding from foreign sources – including donations from Ethiopians abroad – was automatically classed as a foreign organisation. This designation placed them under the direct watch of security agencies and banned them from engaging in advocacy, conflict resolution, criminal justice reform, governance activities, human rights work and virtually all meaningful civil society functions.

This was a way of criminalising independent human rights work, and its impact was swift and severe: in late 2012, Ethiopia’s Charities and Societies Agency shut down 10 CSOs under the law’s provisions and issued warnings to over 400 others.

The law paralysed human rights work for close to a decade. International funders found their Ethiopian partners unable to carry out meaningful advocacy work, while local organisations struggled to maintain their independence and access the resources they needed to operate. The designation as a foreign organisation carried such stigma that many groups pre-emptively self-censored or abandoned sensitive work. By 2019, at least 17 organisations had been forced to shut down or completely change their mandates, while many others significantly reduced their activities or risked working in a climate of constant fear and surveillance.

Amid some limited democratic reforms introduced following a 2018 change of government, the Charities and Societies Proclamation was repealed in 2019. The government replaced it with a new law that removed the cap on foreign funding and explicitly protected civil society’s right to engage in any lawful activity, including previously restricted economic activities.

This reversal made Ethiopia one of only a handful of countries where restrictive foreign agents laws have been repealed, offering hope that even deeply entrenched restrictive frameworks can be overturned when political conditions change. However, the years of harm done while the restrictive law was in force can’t be reversed.