UN Special Rapporteur’s Report to the Human Rights Council on Groups Most at Risk When Exercising Assembly and Association Rights

PUBLISHED: APRIL 14, 2014

In recent years many governments have responded to people’s assertions of peaceful dissent by violently clamping down on peaceful protests and other forms of assembly, unduly restricting the ability of associations to form and operate, and physically assaulting civil society actors.

While those actions have negatively affected all who exercise their rights to peacefully assemble and freely associate, certain groups are at particular risk of having their space all but vanish.

In this report (A/HRC/26/29), the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Maina Kiai, focuses on the challenges facing groups that are often relegated to the margins of society, both in their daily lives and in the exercise of their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. He hopes to cast the spotlight on the ways in which the denial of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association leads to the marginalization of those groups and how marginalization exacerbates their inability to effectively exercise their rights.