by DHANANJAYAN SRISKANDARAJAH
The Occupy movement is one example of citizen-led disruption PHOTO/Judith Scherr/IPS
Many US citizens may instinctively believe they still live in the land of the free, but a new global rights rating system shows the country is far less tolerant than they may think.
The world’s first systematic review of how well countries uphold fundamental civic freedoms – to protest, organise and speak out – reveals a significant deterioration in the protection of these constitutional rights in the US.
From the streets to the internet, civic space is being contested and restricted, threatened by a new era of state authoritarianism. People of colour and social movements such as Black Lives Matter routinely experience first-hand police harassment and violence. Mass arrests, the use of excessive force, laws requiring prior authorisation for peaceful gatherings and undercover police infiltration of peaceful protests were once the preserve of authoritarian regimes, but these confrontational and brutalising tactics are increasingly being used by the state to suppress its own citizens.
The battle over the freedom of the internet is raging, spearheaded by the National Security Agency, arguably the world leader in collecting data on people’s private electronic communications. How free can expression be when we are wired into a Big Brother complex with such fearfully oppressive potential?
The US is not alone of course and there are dozens of countries around the world in which governments are cracking down even harder on protest, shutting down organisations on flimsy pretexts, and brutally silencing dissent by intimidating and murdering human rights defenders, lawyers and investigative journalists.
Rights violations in countries like Bahrain, China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia may be well known but the scale of the current global rights crisis is staggering.
The findings of the new CIVICUS Monitor conclude that over 3.2 billion people currently live in countries where civic space is repressed or closed. Most alarming is just how few countries are categorised as having open space – only 9 out of the 104 for which there is verified data.
In many mature, respected democracies like the US, Australia and Hungary, civic space faces a new wave of threats. Just last week, a senior United Nations official expressed concerns about Australia where a raft of new laws, as well as the public vilification of human rights defenders by senior government officials, is having a ‘chilling effect’ on civil society. From intensifying secrecy laws to a proliferation of anti-protest legislation, he cited a range of measures now combining to levy ‘enormous pressure’ on Australian civil society.
Europe may well be home to all nine of the countries categorised as ‘open’, but all is not well there either. Hungary, once the beacon of post-Cold War democratic hope, is now rated as having ‘obstructed’ civic space. Over the last year, the Hungarian government, finding their country at the centre of refugee flows into Europe from Syria and the north and horn of Africa, has installed a fence along Hungary’s southern border and introduced a raft of restrictive immigration and border control policies. NGOs critical of the government’s response have been threatened with de-registration and subjected to baseless legal and administrative investigations, while outspoken journalists have routinely faced criminal defamation charges brought by politicians.
Inter Press Service for more