“We’re not dealing with civil society
members but paid political activists who are trying to help foreign interests
here.” So claimed Viktor Orban, Hungary’s increasingly autocratic prime
minister, last July, in a speech describing his plans to turn his country into
an “illiberal state”.
This continued an attack that began
earlier this year on dozens of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Hungary
that have received funds from the Norwegian government under a 20-year-old deal
to strengthen civil society in poorer parts of Europe.
The NGOs, among them the Roma Press
Centre, Women for Women against Violence and Labrisz Lesbian Association, are
being “audited” by the Hungarian government, leading Norway to suspend its
payments in protest. On September 8th police raided two NGOs responsible for
distributing the Norwegian grants.
Egypt, meanwhile, is planning to require
NGOs to seek approval from a government-appointed committee before they can
receive foreign funds. The planned rules are unclear; NGOs fear arbitrary
crackdowns on their finances.
Egypt and Hungary are just two fronts
in an escalating war waged by authoritarian governments against groups
promoting the Western vision of liberal democracy as not just regular elections
but public, pluralistic debate.
Recent years have seen a big rise in
“philanthropic protectionism”, says Douglas Rutzen of the International Centre
for Non-Profit Law (ICNL), which tracks how governments treat NGOs. Some, like
Hungary, harass foreign-funded NGOs using existing tools, such as heavy-handed
investigations. Others are writing new laws that serve the same purpose.
Azerbaijan, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia,
Sudan and Venezuela have all passed laws in the past two years affecting NGOs
that receive foreign funds. Around a dozen more countries plan to do so,
including Bangladesh, Egypt, Malaysia and Nigeria. NGOs focused on
democracy-building or human rights are the most affected, but the crackdown is
also hitting those active in other areas, such as public health.
In the years following the cold war,
some autocratic governments saw welcoming foreign support and cash for NGOs as
an easy way to win favour with America and its allies. But the role played in
Ukraine’s 2004 Orange revolution by NGOs, including some that had received
money from the Open Society Institute, which was founded by George Soros, an
American billionaire, led to a change in attitude.
The next year Vladimir Putin,
Russia’s president, declared that “public organisations” could not receive
foreign assistance; by 2012 NGOs that received money from abroad and engaged in
“political activities”, broadly defined, had to register as “foreign agents”, a
phrase that comes close to implying espionage.
This year, after NGOs refused to
comply, Russia’s government gave itself the power to deem them foreign agents
by fiat. Last month the Soldiers’ Mothers of St Petersburg, a group seeking information
about Russian servicemen thought to have been injured or killed in Ukraine, was
declared a foreign agent despite protestations that it receives no money from
abroad.
Many of the new laws are broadly
drafted and vague about the criteria for blocking foreign cash. Russian NGOs
active in sensitive areas, such as human rights, have had their offices raided
in the hunt for evidence of foreign influence. Uzbekistan requires all foreign
donations to be paid into two state-owned banks, from which very little of it
ever emerges.
In Egypt, where the government plans
to tighten already restrictive laws further, a $5,000 “Nelson Mandela
Innovation Award” in 2011 from Civicus, a global network of NGOs, to the New
Woman Foundation, an Egyptian NGO, was blocked for unspecified “security
reasons”.
Suspicion of foreign funding for NGOs
is not new—and is also felt in democracies. A list published by the New York
Times on September 7th of grants made by foreign governments to big
Washington think-tanks led to claims of undue foreign influence—even though
USAID, the American government’s development arm, also funds think-tanks and
NGOs abroad. But despite claims to the contrary by Mr Putin and other autocrats
seeking cover for their crackdowns, America does not ban foreign governments
from funding NGOs, requiring only that they be open about it.
Since 1976 Indian NGOs have needed
government approval for foreign donations, in response to what Indira Ghandi,
then prime minister, thought was the “foreign hand” of the FBI meddling in her
country’s affairs. Recent reports of an intelligence dossier claiming that the
activities of foreign-funded NGOs had cut India’s growth rate have sparked
fears that Narendra Modi, the nationalistic new prime minister, will tighten
the rules further.
In India, restrictions on overseas
donations sit alongside a thriving civil society. But the new laws elsewhere
should be seen in the context of a much larger list of measures restricting the
action of NGOs, says Mr Rutzen of the ICNL—including some that limit freedom of
association or the ability to meet without a government representative
attending.
These have already had a significant
effect, according to “Closing Space”, a report by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, which lists 50 countries that place some restrictions on
overseas funding of NGOs.
In the past two years USAID has been
thrown out of Russia and Bolivia. The number of organisations working on
political and social issues in Uzbekistan is dramatically lower than a decade
ago. In Ethiopia, which in 2009 limited many NGOs to raising no more than 10%
of their funds abroad, some human-rights groups have had to curtail their
activities or even leave the country.
According to the Closing Space
report, Western governments and foundations that fund NGOs abroad did not take
the backlash seriously enough at first, perhaps because they mistook a lasting
trend for a temporary reaction against the muscular foreign policy and
democracy-promoting “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush. Instead, the authors
argue, it “should be understood as the ‘new normal’, the result of underlying
shifts in international politics that are bound to last for some time.”
Give and take
A fight back is belatedly getting
under way. In 2011 the UN appointed Maina Kiai as a Special Rapporteur on the
Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, to focus on the
problem.
The Open Government Partnership, an
intergovernmental group set up the same year, provides cash to governments
committed to promoting transparency and a pluralistic civil society. The
development arms of the American, British and Swedish governments, and
foundations such as Ford, MacArthur and the Open Society Institute, are among
those seeking to support NGOs in affected countries. The staff of some
vulnerable groups are being trained in how to lobby against repressive laws and
do better at domestic fundraising.
Lobbying by the Community of
Democracies, another intergovernmental group, is said to have helped stop or
soften recent attempts to weaken NGOs in at least five countries. Nonetheless,
the tide will be hard to turn.
In May Mr. Kiai published three
general principles to protect “civil space”, the first of which stated that
being able to seek funding, and to receive and spend it, is “inherent to the
right to freedom of association”. It is a freedom that in many places is
increasingly under threat.
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