In Defending the Right to Protest: Resisting Government Crackdowns on Nonviolent Demonstrators, ICNL provides an overview of critical threats to peaceful protest worldwide and shares important tools that civil society can use to defend and advance the right to protest. 

This document was designed to help participants in this process and other stakeholders understand the Principles, advocate for their adoption, assess country laws and practices against the Principles, and convene multi-sector dialogues to discuss the country’s legal environment as compared to the Principles.

Briefer summarizes these laws and implementation practices governing civil society organization in the 35 Organization of American States member States.

With support from the Ford Foundation, ICNL launched a project from February 2020 through October 2022 to address FATF and AML/CFT issues related to nonprofit operations in three countries: Jordan, Tunisia, and Lebanon.

With support from ICNL, local civil society organizations (CSOs) assessed the operational civic space for CSOs in Myanmar from December 2021 to April 2022. Led by a local partner with significant experience in service delivery and civic space issues, the assessment obtained first-hand testimonies from organizations operating on the ground in across Myanmar.

In 2022, El Salvador proposed a restrictive new law that threatened to decimate civil society. The draft law would require civil society organizations (CSOs) to register as foreign agents if they received funding and philanthropic giving from abroad, criminalize many of their normal activities, and impose a 40 percent tax on their financial transactions. Aware that a similar law in a neighboring country had shut down hundreds of organizations, Salvadoran CSOs concluded the region’s civil societies needed to come together and organize a joint defense.

Until recently, Nigerian civil society organizations (CSOs) were grouped with casinos, real estate agents, and gemstone dealers as institutions highly vulnerable to infusions of “dirty money” and funds intended for terrorists. But this changed in May 2022, when the Nigerian president signed two new laws removing CSOs from the high-risk category. The reform resulted from six years of skillful advocacy by Nigerian organizations, with technical support from ECNL, ICNL, and our partner HSC.

This report by UNSR Clement Voule, identifies a path forward for ending Internet shutdowns and will act as a key resource for supporting efforts by governments, companies, international institutions, and civil society to strengthen cooperation and implementation measures to end shutdowns.

During the 2021 Bread&Net, ICNL held a workshop on the importance of civil society involvement in the development of national strategies on artificial intelligence (AI). The use of AI is spreading rapidly around the region, and there are numerous examples of it being used to undermine online freedoms.

We are focusing on ChatGPT because it has drawn the most headlines, but the concerns discussed here apply equally to all the other generative AI.