|2016

WORLD REPORT 2016
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
ganizations to finance their crimes, the differential treatment again reveals other
concerns.
The ultimate irony is that many of the same governments that restrict civil society’s
right to seek funding abroad themselves spend copiously on lobbyists or
public relations firms to spruce up their own images overseas. Governments
such as those of Russia, China, Egypt, and Azerbaijan have spent millions of dollars
in Washington alone to put a benign face on their repression, while starving
civil society as it tries to alleviate that repression at home. Their concern about
cross-border funding influencing the public debate thus seems to depend on
whether the funding contributes to scrutinizing or reinforcing the government
line.
In sum, efforts to restrict civil society’s access to foreign donors is not about
transparency or good governance. It is about avoiding organized oversight of
governance, about blocking what is often the sole source of independent funding
for such efforts when domestic sources do not exist or have been scared off.
If governments really want to shelter their societies from foreign funds, they
could emulate the reclusiveness of North Korea. In fact, they want a selective
cutoff, enabling commercial funds and aid to themselves but restricting funds
that might be used to hold them accountable. Any such governmental distinction
between commercial and charitable funds, or between aid to themselves and aid
to civic groups, should be seen for what it is: an effort to block their citizens’
rights to freedom of expression and association, and the accountable government
they foster.
Death by Regulation
Beyond restricting funds, autocrats are increasingly adopting laws and regulations
to rein in civil society. These rules have the advantage of seeming ordinary,
routine, apolitical. And some indeed are unobjectionable—for example, those
requiring honest and transparent budgeting, respect for labor laws, or simple
administrative registration. Yet autocrats seeking to stifle civil society have used
legal constraints to accomplish far more: to undermine the very independence of
civic groups.
A common method is to claim that civil society jeopardizes some vague, government-defined
sense of the common good—usually meaning the government’s
continuation in power or policies favored by a powerful constituency.
• Russia criminalized revelations about military losses during “special operations,”
which just happened to include the Kremlin’s military activities in
eastern Ukraine. Critics of Russia’s annexation of Crimea also faced prosecution.
• China enacted a series of laws on state security, cybersecurity, and counterterrorism
that conflate peaceful criticism with threats to national security.
The proposed Foreign NGO Management Law would broadly preclude
civic groups from “endangering China’s national interests” or “society’s
public interest,” as well as “public order and customs.”
• Kazakhstan has criminalized “inciting social, national, clan, racial, class, or
religious discord,” which it has used repeatedly to silence critics.
• Hungary used “fraud” charges to attack funding groups that addressed corruption
and human rights.
• Turkey jailed journalists and closed media groups that showed themselves
willing to scrutinize government policy and corruption, or report evidence of
arms transfers to Syrian opposition groups.
• Uganda’s parliament adopted an act that, if signed into law, would permit
up to three-year prison sentences for leaders of independent groups that
shirk broad and undefined “special obligations,” including engaging in any
act that is “prejudicial to the interests of Uganda or the dignity of the people
of Uganda.”
• Sudanese journalists and civil society activists who voice dissent face
charges of “crimes against the state” that carry the death sentence.
• Cambodia shuts groups that “jeopardize peace, stability and public order
or harm the national security, national unity, culture and traditions of Cambodian
society.”
• A Moroccan court ordered the closure of an association that promoted the
rights of the population of the Ifni region on the grounds that it harmed Morocco’s
“territorial integrity.”
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