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The year 2023 has seen a global shrinking of civil freedoms, with almost a third of the world’s population now being denied any civil freedom at all, a report by CIVICUS, an international network of civil society organisations, has said.
The report “People Power Under Attack” said civil society was under severe attack in 118 of the 198 countries and territories it studied. It is the worse result since 2018, when CIVICUS began systematic monitoring of civic freedoms around the world.
The report said that in Central Asia, prosecution of journalists and human rights defenders continued to be the most common violation of civic freedom.
According to the report, civic spaces in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are “repressed”, while in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan they are “closed”.
The report assesses each country and territory based on the state of freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression, and gives them points on a scale between 0 and 100. It then defines the state of civic space in each as “open”, “narrowed”, “obstructed”, “repressed” or “closed”.
Out of the Central Asian nations, Kyrgyzstan showed the best result with 40 points, followed by Kazakhstan with 27 points, Uzbekistan with 18, Tajikistan 12 and Turkmenistan 8.
The report noted “an escalating crackdown on civil society and media” in Kyrgyzstan, as a result of which the country’s civic space assessment shifted from “obstructed” to “repressed”.
The report particularly noted the “foreign agent” bill under consideration by the Kyrgyz parliament, and a rise in politically motivated criminal prosecutions.
Also of particular concern was the use of extremism charges against Tajik rights defender Manuchehr Kholiknazarov and Kazakh opposition activist Marat Zhylanbayev, and the Turkmen authorities’ hunt for and forcible repatriation of government critics abroad, the report said.
Also in Tajikistan, authorities closed down a number of civil society groups, with those in the restive Mountainous Badakhshan Region coming under harshest pressure, involving threats and intimidation, according to the report.
The report also noted that the Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik governments had continued to evade responsibility for the violent suppression of anti-government protests that took place in each country in 2022 – the Kazakh ‘Bloody January’, the Karakalpak unrest in Uzbekistan, and the protests in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Region.
“As a result, a climate of impunity prevails, allowing serious human rights violations such as excessive force, torture and ill-treatment to continue unchecked,” the report said.
In terms of media freedom, it noted that at least two independent websites, the New Tajikistan 2 and Pamir Daily News, were banned in Tajikistan as ‘extremist’, and in Kyrgyzstan, the authorities were seeking closure of the Kloop online portal.
The Turkmen government continued to strictly control the internet, with thousands of websites made inaccessible for citizens, the report noted.
The report said civic space had eroded in Europe too. European states “escalated repression of environmental activists” and used “arrests, prosecutions and intimidation” in response to non-violent protests and civil disobedience actions, it said.
It also expressed concern about a directive on ‘foreign interference’ in the EU’s ‘Defence of Democracy’ package presented in May. If adopted it would require civil society groups to disclose funding from sources outside the EU and subject them to strict restrictions.
The report defined Russia’s civic space as “closed” – it scored 17 points out of 100 (ahead of only Tajikistan and Turkmenistan if compared to the Central Asian nations).
The report said Russia continued to stifle civil society activities using its ‘foreign agent’ law. Among the organisations targeted most recently were Transparency International and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Meanwhile in Belarus (which scored 16 points), over 800 organisations were undergoing forced closure as of May, as part of a “mopping-up operation” against “bandits and foreign agents” declared by President Aleksandr Lukashenko.
