This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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No turning back: Women human rights defenders remain steadfast in perilous times
By: []
Date: 2021-12
In truth, clampdowns on WHRD advocacy did not begin with this health crisis. COVID has simply made a bad situation worse. A number of human rights and other advocacy groups have noted a climate of greater restrictions on public advocacy in recent years (think of suppression of protests in Hong Kong, Belarus, Nigeria and in the US, particularly under the Trump administration). But what some call “shrinking civic space” is too innocent a description. Civic space doesn’t shrink and expand like a sponge with water. It is actively made to shrink, and sometimes disappear.
Technology and economics
One effective means of challenging civic space is through challenging those that fill it. Crackdowns on protest and resistance, and threats to groups of defenders, are continuing at more sophisticated levels as technology evolves. Facial recognition systems are used within Facebook and also by local police departments to target individuals. And surveillance takes place in the streets, as well as in activists’ hands – through cell phones.
The ‘Pegasus’ spyware scandal which targeted cell phones, affected human rights defenders around the globe, including WHRDs such as Yésica Sánchez Maya, a member of the Steering Group of Oaxaca Consortium in Mexico. Pegasus is a program owned by the Israeli company, NSO Group, whose products, according to its website, “help government intelligence and law enforcement agencies use technology to … prevent and investigate terror and crime.”
Too often, governments have labelled activists as threats to the state to justify authorizing surveillance efforts. Yet in a bold move from the US government, the US Commerce Department stated that NSO acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”, in part because of its targeting human rights activists, and, earlier this month, the country placed the company’s products on its trade blacklist.
WHRDs and other defenders face another omnipresent problem: there is a market for clampdowns on advocacy, and an economic and subsequently political need for an industry that maintains a narrative of threat. One Israeli estimate suggests NSO could be valued at $2bn if it were to go public. So there is an economic and lucrative imperative behind these invasive technologies.
The view from here isn’t so good
On a global level, threats to democracy, political participation, and freedom of expression and assembly coexist with threats to multilateralism and to the human rights system, generally. There are efforts to punish truth tellers and to destabilize governance around the world– and these have significant rights implications, including for WHRDs.
In the US, for instance, these take the shape of what are often described as right-wing conservatives or extremists. Even lower-level government officials who are simply trying to do their jobs with integrity are under threat. Recently, election officials in Arizona, Vermont and Georgia have received death threats because they have not been willing to support Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. One report from June 2021 reveals that 75% of local election officials are women, which makes for a lot of targeted women.
A recent article in the Guardian explores the fact that many journalists are WHRDs and have been subjected to terrible abuses. An April 2021 UNESCO report entitled “The Chilling”, which focuses on online violence against women journalists, noted that Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist in the Philippines, was, at one point, subjected to 90 harassing messages an hour on Facebook. The experiences of Carole Cadwalladr, the fearless British journalist who exposed the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, are also featured in the UNESCO report, which drew from a survey of 901 journalists from 125 countries:
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