High Commissioner, CIVICUS welcomes your annual report, very rich update this morning and your strong independent voice! We share your concern that a growing number of states are selectively adhering to their international human rights and humanitarian law obligations. We note, in particular, the introduction of a spate of national legislation undermining the rights to freedoms of expression, association, peaceful assembly and participation in public affairs.
Increasingly these unwarranted restrictions are afflicting both mature and emerging democracies. As the rhetoric of development and economic growth fails to translate into substantive changes on the ground, governments across the world are responding to public grievances and dissent with repression rather than accommodation. Human rights defenders and civil society activists advocating for policies which support greater economic equity are increasingly being subjected to a broad range of undue limitations, harassment and even extra-judicial killings.
In the Oromia region of Ethiopia, the government has responded to popular protests against the dispossession of land without adequate compensation or consultation with excessive and lethal force, resulting in the death of over 150 protestors since December 2015. We are equally alarmed by the growing levels of violence committed against land, indigenous and environmental activists in Cambodia, Colombia and Ecuador and deplore the assassination last week of prominent human rights defender Berta Càceres in Honduras. Similarly we express deep alarm at the unrelenting judicial harassment and intimidation of human rights lawyers in China who continue to face politically motivated charges of “subversion of state power”.
Across Europe we also witnessing worrying trends of democratic backsliding and attempts to undermine civic space in Hungary, Poland and most recently in the UK under the “anti – lobbying” clause.
High Commissioner, we encourage the UN HRC and its subsidiary bodies to continue to address these systematic attacks on civil society organizations as a matter or priority. Restrictions on these rights pose a challenge to global cooperation, including to the realization of the 2030 development agenda. We urge member and observer States of the Council to head your warnings.