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	Civic freedoms are the backbone of good governance and inclusive democracy by CIVICUS, agencies   Dec. 2025   People Power Under Attack 2025 (CIVICUS)   The world has witnessed a dramatic rollback in fundamental freedoms, including speech, peaceful assembly and association, over the past five years, according to the latest ratings report from the CIVICUS Monitor.   The report, People Power Under Attack 2025, finds that people in 83 countries and territories now live with their freedoms routinely denied, compared to 67 in 2020, with stark declines both in states considered democracies and those governed by authoritarian regimes. The proportion of people living in countries with ‘Open’ or ‘Narrowed’ civic space, fell from nearly 13% in 2020 to just over 7% today.   “We see a continued trend of attacks on people’s right to speak up, come together as a collective, and protest for their rights around the world. This year’s slide is led by states often seen as models of democracy such as the USA, France, and Italy. In a context of rising authoritarianism and populism, no country seems immune from this deeply worrying trend,” said CIVICUS Secretary General Mandeep Tiwana.   “Civic freedoms are the backbone of good governance and inclusive democracy, but fewer and fewer governments are willing to respect the agency of their people to freely and meaningfully participate in public life.”   This year alone, 15 countries saw their ratings downgraded. Among the most concerning changes is the decline in the United States, which moved to the third tier rating ‘Obstructed’ following sweeping executive orders, militarised responses to protests and mounting attacks on press freedom.   European Union Member States, France, Germany and Italy were also all downgraded to ‘Obstructed’, reflecting a hardening stance on dissent, including the adoption of restrictive laws and practices to limit pro-Palestinian and environmental protests. Israel’s civic space fell even further to ‘Repressed’ as authorities eroded judicial independence, assaulted protesters, targeted and deported Palestinian citizens of Israel, and banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from operating in Israel, all amid the genocide in Gaza. Civic space in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is already rated ‘Closed’ following years of Israeli control.   In the Americas, El Salvador moved to ‘Repressed’ as President Bukele consolidated power, introduced a foreign agents law targeting the media and civil society, and further dismantled institutional checks and balances.   In Africa, Sudan now joins the list of worst offenders in the ‘Closed’ category where civic space is practically non-existent, following more than two years of devastating civil war that has allowed the parties to the conflict to crush the space for civil society and media across the country. Burundi also fell to ‘Closed,’ while Madagascar dropped to ‘Repressed’ following deadly crackdowns on sustained youth-led protests, eventually leading to the military takeover in October 2025.   “While each downgrade reflects the sum of particular incidents in a country or territory, together they show clearly that across the world, civic space is under sustained attack by governments and anti-rights actors,” said CIVICUS Monitor Head Ine Van Severen.   The report documents the most common violations of civic freedoms in 2025. Detention of protesters is the top violation, documented in at least 76 countries, with half of those documented in Africa South of the Sahara. Journalists are frequently detained under restrictive laws, including cybercrimes laws and in some countries vague security or anti-terrorism laws, while judicial harassment of activists is also widely documented.   “The detention of protesters and activists has become the preferred method of governments to silence those who dissent or publicly disagree with the authorities,” said Ine Van Severen. “Authorities must stop detaining people and breaking up protests, and instead start listening to and engaging with people’s demands.”   Despite these troubling trends, the report highlights some positive developments. Chile advanced protections for environmental defenders through landmark legislation, while Senegal and Gabon improved their ratings following political transitions and legal reforms.   Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, an interim government released protesters and activists from prison, many of whom were persecuted under the regime of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. These examples show that progress is possible when governments engage constructively with civil society and uphold international human rights standards.   “We are witnessing a global emergency for civic freedoms. Even with some encouraging steps in places like Chile, Senegal, and Gabon, these remain exceptions to a deeply troubling global trend. Governments must act decisively: dismantle restrictive policies, end arbitrary detentions, and guarantee the right to protest. Failure to do so will risk eroding the legitimacy that underpins their authority,” said Tiwana.   * The CIVICUS Monitor is a global research platform that assesses the state of civic freedoms—including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly—across 198 countries and territories. Each country is assigned a score from 0 to 100, reflecting the openness of its civic space, with higher scores indicating greater respect for civic freedoms. Based on these scores, countries are classified into five categories: Open, Narrowed, Obstructed, Repressed, or Closed.   http://monitor.civicus.org/globalfindings_2025 http://publications.civicus.org/publications/2025-state-of-civil-society-report/ http://lens.civicus.org/sudan-in-crisis-mass-killings-continue-while-the-world-looks-away/ http://srdefenders.org/joint-statement-time-to-release-all-human-rights-defenders-and-end-their-prolonged-detention/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/topic/civic-space-and-human-rights-defenders   Oct. 2025   Attacks on global aid, rising securitisation, and the dismantling of the international aid architecture pose an urgent threat to fundamental freedoms, a UN expert warned today.   “The collapse of global aid greatly endangers the survival of civil society organisations and threatens the entire civil society ecosystem, as well as the future of international solidarity, collective action, and participation in multilateral forums,” said Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in her report to the 80th session of the UN General Assembly.   Romero noted that, since the beginning of 2025, thousands of civil society associations that have been filling critical gaps by providing life-saving services, supporting victims of human rights violations, delivering vital humanitarian responses, and working to fight corruption, protect the environment, and advance peacebuilding, are either disappearing or severely reducing their operations. The impact has been especially severe for grassroots organisations and those led by women, LGBTQI groups, and marginalised communities.   “What is unfolding is not merely a funding issue, it is a structural crisis in the international solidarity ecosystem,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Civic space globally is suffocating, not only because States are intensifying the scale and gravity of repression, but also because the lifelines that kept it alive are fundamentally challenged.”   The expert stressed that securitisation of the global agenda is driving a shift in funds and political priorities towards strengthening defence and military capabilities at the expense of democratisation and human rights. She noted that States are increasingly misusing national security grounds and discourse to justify the repression civil society and social movements.   “The securitisation and militarisation of State responses to non-violent collective actions, which are increasingly led by youth activists and have resulted in serious violations, are deeply alarming,” Romero said.   The Special Rapporteur called for urgent action to rebuild international solidarity and redesign a strengthened, fairer global aid architecture. “This requires reimagining international aid architecture, through a participatory and transparent process, and ensuring that it is equitable, inclusive, people-centred and rights-based,” she said.   The expert warned that severe restrictions on fundamental freedoms threaten decades of progress on human rights and democratisation, jeopardising the fulfilment of global commitments towards the Sustainable Development Goals, peace and security, inclusion and equality, and climate justice.   “States should implement a human rights-based approach to security, ensuring security policies and decisions are firmly rooted in international human rights standards; enable freedoms; and foster democratic resilience and inclusive governance,” Romero said.   http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/global-aid-dismantling-poses-existential-threat-collective-action-and-human http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a80219-report-special-rapporteur-rights-freedom-peaceful-assembly-and http://eurochild.org/news/podcast-shrinking-funds-for-nonprofits/
	Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves by Rafal Rohozinski SecDev Flashnotes Canada   Nov. 2025   The headlines focused on what they always focus on: the rhetoric about immigrants, the dismissiveness toward European allies, the muscular nationalism that plays well in certain domestic constituencies. But while pundits dissected the predictable provocations of the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy, the document’s most consequential passages slipped past largely unnoticed. The real revolution is buried in the fine print. It concerns not borders or battalions, but bytes and bandwidth.   What the NSS articulates, with remarkable candour for a strategic document, is a fundamental reimagining of the global order. Not the reimagining that critics expected, a retreat from international engagement, but something far more ambitious: the explicit subordination of allied sovereignty to American digital dominance.   The document announces what might be called a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, positioning the Western Hemisphere as a zone of exclusive American economic and strategic influence. The United States will, it declares, “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”   Read that carefully. “Strategically vital assets” in 2025 no longer means military bases or shipping lanes. It means cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, and the digital arteries through which modern economies flow. The language is aimed primarily at China, but its logic applies universally, extending to any power, including European allies, that might challenge American technological preeminence in Washington’s backyard.   “The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.”   That sentence, buried in the strategy’s economic provisions, deserves to be read and reread. It is perhaps the most honest articulation of American strategic thinking in decades. Countries within the American sphere (and Canada sits at the very centre of that sphere) are expected not merely to cooperate with American firms but to preference them exclusively. The document pairs this expectation with an instruction to “make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region,” extending explicitly to “cyber communications networks” and technology infrastructure.   Here is where the document’s internal contradictions become not merely philosophical but practically consequential. The NSS premises its entire strategic logic on the primacy of national sovereignty. Nations, it insists, must “put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.”   This is the animating principle behind every critique of multilateral institutions, every withdrawal from international agreements, every insistence that America will no longer subordinate its interests to global consensus.   Yet the same document that celebrates sovereignty as the foundational principle of international order proceeds to systematically circumscribe the sovereignty of America’s closest allies. The Hemisphere is defined as an American zone of prerogative. Technology procurement is expected to favour American vendors.   Partnership benefits become “contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence,” language elastic enough to encompass European technology partnerships, Asian supply chains, or any collaboration that might dilute American market dominance.   This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense. It is something more coherent and more troubling: a worldview in which sovereignty exists in concentric circles, with American sovereignty absolute and allied sovereignty conditional.   The United States reserves for itself the right to determine which external influences are “adversarial” and which partnerships are permissible. Sovereignty, in this framework, is not a universal principle but a privilege that flows downward from Washington.   For countries like Canada, the implications are stark. Between 64 and 70 percent of Canadian internet traffic already routes through American territory. All thirteen trans-Pacific fibre-optic cables land on the American west coast; none terminate in Canada. Over 61 percent of Canadian businesses store critical data on American cloud services.   The digital economy that increasingly defines Canadian prosperity runs on infrastructure neither owned nor controlled domestically. The NSS transforms this dependency from an inconvenience into a lever, a mechanism of influence more effective than any tariff.   But the Canadian case merely illustrates a global dynamic. We are entering a zero-sum world where allies and partners are transient and transactional, where relationships are measured not in shared values but in commercial advantage.   The concentration of power within the emerging global digital economy, particularly its commanding heights in AI and cloud infrastructure, means that technological dependency translates directly into political subordination. Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves.   This is, in many ways, more consequential than the NSS’s more inflammatory provisions. The disparagement of immigrants will generate outrage and resistance. European leaders will bristle at their diminished status and find ways to push back. These are visible conflicts that will play out in diplomatic exchanges and newspaper editorials.   But the quiet restructuring of digital dependency, the transformation of technological dominance into instruments of statecraft, operates below the threshold of public attention. It reshapes the architecture of power while everyone argues about the furniture.   The question this strategy forces upon America’s allies is not whether to resist American influence (that ship has largely sailed) but whether to accept a future in which sovereignty becomes a formality, a flag to be waved while decisions of consequence are made elsewhere. For countries that have built their prosperity on American-controlled digital infrastructure, the choice may already be constrained.   For those with time and foresight to act, the NSS should serve as a clarifying document: a roadmap of the future Washington envisions, and a warning about the costs of dependency in an age when data is power and platforms are territory. It is always important to read the fine print. In this case, the fine print is not merely important. It is the strategy itself. Everything else is theatre.   * Rafal Rohozinski is the CEO of the Secdev Group, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and co-chair of the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster.
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