|2016

WORLD REPORT 2016
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
• Ecuadorian police used excessive force against citizens demonstrating
against a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow unlimited
presidential re-election. President Rafael Correa’s response was not to investigate
the abusive police officers but to congratulate them for their “professionalism.”
Some governments seek to exploit natural resources unimpeded by popular
input or independent oversight. For example:
• Oil-rich Azerbaijan has been imprisoning civil society leaders to avoid public
unrest over its eye-popping corruption and official mismanagement. Europe
has been too busy buying its oil and gas and wooing it from Russia’s
influence to mount much protest.
• Uzbekistan, whose officials personally profit from the cotton sector, has attacked
people trying to document and report on forced labor within the industry.
The World Bank has boosted its investment in the industry, but has
limited its expression of concern to private conversations of questionable
utility.
Behind these varied motivations for cracking down on civil society is the autocrats’
view equating organized public debate with a political threat. Better to
prevent or hinder people from joining together, these governments seem to reason,
than risk their discontent being widely heard and embraced.
From this fear of unfettered public debate comes a series of devices that have
been used to restrict or stifle civil society. These include threats, violence, arbitrary
arrests, trumped-up prosecutions, and two increasingly common techniques:
restricting the right to seek foreign funding, and imposing arbitrary and
oppressive regulations.
Restricting the Right to Seek Financial Support
Many countries are too poor to have a pool of donors capable of significant financial
contributions to civic groups. Even when individuals are wealthy enough
to make such gifts, autocrats can often dissuade them by attacking their business
interests. Threatening a tax investigation, withholding necessary licenses,
or restricting business with the government usually suffices to discourage financial
support for groups critical of the authorities.
When would-be domestic donors are too frightened or lack the means to give
very much, civic groups naturally exercise their right to seek support abroad.
That right, in turn, has become a favorite target of repressive governments. Their
first priority has been to cut off foreign sources of funding for groups that defend
human rights or hold the government to account.
India, its democratic traditions notwithstanding, has been a long-time practitioner
of this technique through its Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which
requires government approval before any civic group can receive a contribution
from abroad. The government’s willingness to allow such contributions tends to
bear an inverse relationship to the “sensitivity” of the group’s work. Service-delivery
groups operate relatively unhindered while human rights groups are often
restrained. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, environmental groups have
been particularly victimized because of perceived challenges to official development
plans. Another activist who was targeted was known for her work on the
anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in Gujarat in which then Chief Minister Modi was implicated.
Russia has applied such restrictions aggressively—first tarring Russian groups
that accept contributions from abroad as “foreign agents” (which in Russian has
the unsavory connotation of “traitor” or “spy”), then banning certain donors as
“undesirable foreign organizations” with criminal penalties applicable to anyone
who cooperates with them.
Other former Soviet states are now emulating Russia. Kyrgyzstan’s parliament is
considering its own “foreign agents” law, which borrows heavily from Russia’s.
Kazakhstan adopted legislation that requires funding for civic groups to be channeled
through a single government-appointed “operator” with discretion over
the dispersal of funds. Belarus requires registering all foreign funding with a government
agency that can reject it if its purpose is not on a narrow officially approved
list. Azerbaijan opened a criminal investigation into a handful of the
most prominent foreign donors, froze the bank accounts of dozens of their
grantees, jailed key veterans of the human rights movement, and required government
licensing of all foreign donors and official approval of each funded project.
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