The civic space is shrinking worldwide, Civicus Monitor says
Civicus Monitor has just released its new report “People Power Under Attack 2025”, which rates the civic space conditions in 198 countries and territories globally.
The report is realised through the collaboration of in-house experts, civil society organisations working in the different countries, and research teams at the regional level, as well as through reliance on international human rights indicators.
The collected data concern freedoms of association, expression and peaceful assembly, and the state’s duty to protect these fundamental freedoms. After combining and validating these various data sources, the report rates each country or territory as either “open”, “narrowed”, “obstructed”, “repressed”, or “closed”, showing rating changes from year to year and highlighting significant trends and major violations of civic freedoms.
Globally, ratings have changed in 18 countries over the last year: only 3 have improved their conditions, while civic space has deteriorated in the remaining 15. Thus, 73 per cent of the people live under restricted conditions worldwide, while just 3.4 per cent live in an open civic space. The detentions of protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders stand as the top three most frequent violations of civic freedoms.
Source: Civicus, CC BY 4.0
From a European perspective, what is certainly most striking this year is the downgrading of Italy, France, and Germany, which is part of a broader general trend of civic and democratic freedoms backsliding across Europe. All three countries have indeed moved from “narrowed” to “obstructed” civic space. France and Germany have mostly witnessed civil protests’ disruptions through i.e., forceful police interventions and restrictions of freedom of expression, while Italy has also passed an “anti-Gandhi” law, giving more powers to the police and introducing new criminal offenses and stronger penalties for protesters and civil disobedience actions, under the excuse of maintaining ‘public security’.
These phenomena raise important questions about the health of the rule of law in these countries. First, there are already questions about whether certain practices (e.g. a certain use of police force) and laws are within the limits of the rule of law. Moreover, as the NET-ROL project stresses, the ability of citizens to coordinate and defend their rights against arbitrary state action can be a key rule of law facilitating mechanism. Thus, significant restrictions on the possibilities and space for citizens’ mobilizations such as those reported by Civicus Monitor might trigger a vicious cycle of erosion of the rule of law. We should all be vigilant monitors.
By Sara Lorenzini
