Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Line, WhatsApp and WeChat are the most popular social media sites in Southeast Asia, but their power to spread free speech is declining. Credit: ITU/R.Farrell

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Feb 15 2018 (IPS)

Researchers recently evaluated 65 countries which represent 87 percent of internet users globally. Half of them experienced a decline of internet freedom. China, Syria and Ethiopia are the least free. Estonia, Iceland and Canada enjoy the most freedom online.

The most remarkable evolution comes from Southeast Asia. A few years ago, this was a promising region. The economy was growing, democracy was on the rise. Malaysia had free elections, Indonesia started an anti-corruption campaign and the social rights of Cambodian garment workers were improving."A few years ago, social media were safe havens for activists. But today these media companies are too cooperative with the autocratic regimes." --Ed Legaspi of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance

“Internet helped these movements grow,” says Madeline Earp, Asia research analyst with Freedom House. “All kinds of organisations and media started using internet more and more. That was hopeful.”

Today, democratisation has faltered. A military coup in Thailand and the dissolution of an opposition party in Cambodia are just two examples of autocratic governments resisting change.

Censorship, arrests and violence

According to the report, seven of the eight Southeast Asian countries researched have become less free in the last year.

“Censorship is on the rise and internet freedom is declining,” Earp says. “Myanmar and Cambodia were the biggest disappointments.”

Recently, journalists were arrested in Myanmar. Fake news spreads hate speech and incites violence against Muslims. Today, Myanmar has more journalists in prison then in the last years of the military regime.

In Cambodia, an independent newspaper was shut down. Activists who denounce illegal activities of companies are being arrested. In Thailan,d the strict lese-majeste law is used to silence opponents. The Philippines has a growing number of ‘opinion shapers’ to push pro-government propaganda.

The only country that has improved its score is Malaysia. But Freedom House says that is mostly because of increasing internet use. Repression is not keeping up with the rapid growth. This shows that Malaysia is following a trend in Southeast Asia. The restriction on freedom of speech starts when internet use goes up.

“The Malaysian government has censored news websites. At least one Malaysian has been sentenced for a post on Facebook,” Earp adds.

The Chinese example

Part of the cause is to be found in China. The influential country has the world’s least free internet for three years, according to the Freedom House report. It uses a sophisticated surveillance system, known as the ‘Great Firewall’. An army of supervisors check on the internet use of the Chinese, from messaging apps to traffic cameras.

Undesirable messages are being deleted by Chinese censors. Sometimes that can lead to absurd situations. A newly discovered beetle was named after President Xi Jinping. But messages about this event were deleted because the predatory nature of the beetle could be insulting to the leader.

These practices play an important role in the decline of democracy in Southeast Asia. “Vietnam is copying the techniques of China,” says researcher Madeline Earp. “More bloggers and activists are being arrested because of their social media use.”

Fake news

Not only censorship is an issue. In Southeast Asia, fake news is being used to eliminate opponents or to manipulate public opinion. This is what Ed Legaspi, director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, explains in The Bulletin.

“Worryingly, many governments have taken advantage of existing mechanisms in social media to spread rumours and combat critical voices,” says Legaspi. “Thailand’s lese majeste law, Malaysian’s sedition act and Indonesia’s blasphemy law have all been used to curtail online speech.”

In Myanmar, inflammatory and racist language against Muslims provokes violent outbreaks regularly. Fake news sites spread rumours about a Buddhist woman who supposedly was raped by a Muslim. This contributed to the violence towards the Rohingya, a Muslim minority. And it helps the army to get support from a large part of the public.

The role of social media cannot be underestimated. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Line, WhatsApp and WeChat are the most popular in Southeast Asia, but their initial power to spread free speech is declining.

“A few years ago, social media were safe havens for activists. But today these media companies are too cooperative with the autocratic regimes,” says Legaspi. “They do nothing to protect their users.”

Manipulated elections

Various countries are organising elections this year. How these governments will deal with these moments of tension will determine the evolution of internet freedom.

Cambodia has elections with no opposition, Malaysia’s polls are heavily manipulated. Not much positive news is expected there. In Indonesia, the regional elections in June will be the first test since a fake news campaign against Jakarta’s once popular governor, Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama. He was convicted of blasphemy and jailed.

The growing knowhow of those in power is being used to improve their fortunes when elections come. Some of them already control internet use and silence activists, a sad evolution in a region that only recently seemed to be making progress.

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are hounded – not by autocratic but by democratic governments – for revealing the truth about grave human rights violations. Nobel peace prize winner, writer and political activist Liu Xiaobo  is currently languishing in a Chinese prison while the killing of Egyptian protestor, poet and mother Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, apparently by a masked policeman, in January this year continues to haunt us. 

CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, has documented serious abuses of civic freedoms in 96 countries in 2014 alone. The annual report of the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, laments that the once-heralded Arab Spring has given way almost everywhere to conflict and repression while Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2014/2015 calls it a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

In recent years, there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civic space – the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly. While the reasons for the eruption of repressive laws and attacks on dissenters vary, negative effects are being felt in both democracies and authoritarian states.

It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies. This begs a deeper analysis into the extent and causes of this pervasive problem.

In several countries, laws continue to be drawn up to restrict civic freedoms. They include anti-terror laws that limit freedom of speech, public order laws that limit the right to protest peacefully, laws that stigmatise civil society groups through derogatory names such as ‘foreign agents’, laws that create bureaucratic hurdles to receive crucial funding from international philanthropic institutions as well as laws that prevent progressive civil society organisations from protecting the rights of marginalised minorities such as the LGBTI community.

In this situation, it is indeed possible to identify four key drivers of the pervasive assault on civic space. The first is the global democratic deficit.  Freedom House, which documents the state of democratic rights around the world, has reported declines in civil liberties and political freedoms for the ninth consecutive year in 2015.

In too many countries, peaceful activists exposing corruption and rights violations are being stigmatised as ‘national security threats’, and subjected to politically motivated trials, arbitrary detentions and worse. There appears to be no let up in official censorship and repression of active citizens in authoritarian states like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam.“It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies”

Freedom of assembly is virtually non-existent in such contexts, and activists are often forced to engage online. But when they do so, they are demonised as being agents of Western security agencies.

Ironically, excessive surveillance and/or hounding of whistle-blowers by countries such as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and United States – whose foreign policies are supposed to promote democratic rights – are contributing to a global climate where close monitoring of anyone suspected of harbouring dissenting views is becoming an accepted norm.

The second driver – and linked to the global democratic deficit – is the worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state. The decline in civic space began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 when several established democracies introduced a slew of counter-terror measures weakening human rights safeguards in the name of protecting national security.

The situation worsened after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as authoritarian leaders witnessed the fall of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia following widespread citizen protests. The possibility of people’s power being able to overturn entrenched political systems has made authoritarian regimes extremely fearful of the free exercise of civic freedoms by citizens.

This has led to a severe push back against civil society by a number of repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up their efforts to prevent public demonstrations and the activities of human rights groups.

Similar reverberations have also been felt in sub-Saharan African countries with long-standing authoritarian leaders and totalitarian political parties. Thus repression of civic freedoms appears to have intensified in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Activists and civil society groups in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe where democracy remains fragile or non-existent such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are also feeling the heat following governments’ reactions to scuttle demands for political reform.

In South-East Asia too, in countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia which have a history of repressive government and in Thailand where the military seized power through a recent coup, new ‘security’ measures continue to be implemented to restrict civic freedoms.

The third major driver of closing civic space is the rampant collusion and indeed capture of power and resources in most countries by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites.

Oxfam International projects that the richest one percent will own more wealth than 99 percent of the globe’s population by 2016.  Thus civil society groups exposing corruption and/or environmental degradation by politically well-connected businesses are extremely vulnerable to persecution due to the tight overlap and cosy relationships among elites.

With market fundamentalism and the neo-liberal economic discourse firmly entrenched in a number of democracies, labour, land and environmental rights activists are facing heightened challenges.

At least 29 environmental activists were reported murdered in Brazil in 2014. Canada’s centre-right government has been closely monitoring and intimidating indigenous peoples’ rights activists opposing large commercial projects in ecologically fragile areas. India’s prime minister recently urged judges to be wary of “five-star activists“ even as the efforts of Greenpeace India to protect forests from the activities of extractive industries have led it to be subjected to various forms of bureaucratic harassment including arbitrary freezing of its bank accounts.

The fourth and emerging threat to civic space comes from the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.

Failure of the international community to prevent violent conflict and address serious human rights abuses by states such as Israel and Syria is providing a fertile breeding ground for religious extremists whose ideology is deeply inimical to the existence of a vibrant and empowered civil society. 

Besides, religious fundamentalists are able to operate more freely in conflicted and politically fragile environments whose number appears to be rising, thereby exacerbating the situation for civil society organisations and activists seeking to promote equality, peace and tolerance.

Current threats to civic space and civil society activities are a symptom of the highly charged and polarised state of international affairs. The solutions to the grave and interconnected economic, ecological and humanitarian crises currently facing humanity will eventually have to come from civil society through a reassertion of its own value even as political leaders continue to undermine collective efforts.

Beginning a series of conversations on how to respond to common threats at the national, regional and international levels is critical. Establishment of solidarity protocols within civil society could be an effective way to coalesce around both individual cases of harassment as well as systemic threats such as limiting legislation or policies.

Further, the international legal framework that protects civic space needs to be strengthened. The International Bill of Rights comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) leaves scope for subjective interpretation of some aspects of civic freedoms.

It is perhaps time to examine the possibility of a comprehensive legally binding convention on civic space that better articulates the extent and scope of civic space, so essential to an empowered civil society.  However, laws are only as good as the commitment of those charged with overseeing their implementation.

Importantly and urgently, to reverse the global onslaught on civic space and human rights, we need visionary political leadership willing to take risks and lead by example.

Over the last few years, analysts have noted with horror the steady dismantling of hard won gains on civic freedoms. Many thought things could get no worse. … but they did.

It is time to start thinking seriously about stemming the tide before we reach the point of no return. Ending the persecution of Assange, Snowden and Liu Xiaobo could be a good start for preventing precious lives such as Shaimaa’s from being lost.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama’s administration and several major rights groups are reacting with frustration to the decision of an Egyptian court, announced Tuesday night, to convict 43 civil society organisations and 16 U.S. employees of illegal use of foreign funds.

Reactions by both the administration and members of the U.S. Congress are implying that the U.S. government may withhold an annual allotment of some 1.3 billion dollars in military aid to Egypt unless the U.S. accused are pardoned.“We were in the process of seeking registration at the time of the original raid – we were trying to comply with Egyptian law." -- Charles Dunne of Freedom House

“This decision runs contrary to the universal principle of freedom of association and is incompatible with the transition to democracy,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday. “I urge the government of Egypt to work with civic groups as they respond to the Egyptian people’s aspirations for democracy as guaranteed in Egypt’s new constitution.”

The decision was followed by an order to close the Egyptian offices of five U.S.-based NGOs, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and the International Center for Journalists. Some from these groups are criticising the U.S. response for being too weak.

Kerry’s statement “could have certainly been stronger,” Charles Dunne, the director of Middle East and North African programmes at Freedom House, told IPS. “It called on the Egyptian government to work with civil society organisations in the midst of a campaign to destroy civil society, which is not the right tone to be striking.”

Tuesday’s verdicts originated from the December 2011 crackdown on NGOs as issued by Egypt’s transitional military government. According to some analysts, holdovers from longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime held civil society groups responsible for helping to start the 2011 revolution that toppled Mubarak.

During the crackdown, NGO offices were raided and criminal charges were brought against personnel.

More recently, President Mohamed Morsi has proposed a new law for regulating NGOs that would require the registration of foreign-funded groups with a committee that includes a government-appointed majority. Dunne condemned the law, calling it the “the most oppressive out there right now”.

Others have expressed similar concerns.

“If this bill passes, all of Egypt’s NGOs would essentially work under the government,” Hafez Abu Seada, chairman of the non-profit Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, told IPS. “We would operate not as independents but as agents for the state.”

The proposed law received criticism from Egyptian NGOs, who say it would be stronger than Mubarak’s requirements, as well as from international groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both groups say the law contradicts the terms of international treaties Egypt has ratified.

Quasi-government endowment

All but one of the U.S. defendants in the court case decided Tuesday, Robert Becker, a former employee of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), left Egypt before the trial was held, after posting bail. According to media reports, Becker was fired by the NDI after his decision to stay in Egypt.

“Personally, I will once again ignore my lawyer’s advice and will be in Egypt,” Becker wrote on his blog. “I was told it would be best for me to go home, so that is exactly where I will be … home, in Cairo.”

Eleven hours after the verdict was announced, Becker again wrote via Twitter that he had “unwillingly and angrily gone into exile until appeals get sorted out.”

If one looks at the history of several of the groups indicted under the new court decision, it is perhaps unsurprising that today’s Egyptian government would be sceptical of these groups’ goals. Four are connected with a quasi-government programme called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

During the Cold War, U.S intelligence agents set up several fake foundations through which they gave money to anti-communist or at least non-communist groups. During the 1980s, the government set up the National Endowment for Democracy to take the place of these various groups.

Over the years, several countries, including, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica and Czechoslovakia, have complained about interference in national elections by the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2012, Congress gave the group around 118 million dollars.

The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) make up the endowment’s core constituents, while Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists received funding from the endowment.

According to CQ Roll Call, a Washington newspaper, the IRI has been accused of attempting to choose winners and losers in elections in Haiti and several countries in South America, though the organisation has denied this.

Though several of these NGOs have denied any wrongdoing, defendants received anywhere from one and five years in prison. Egyptian lawyer Khaled Abo Bakr, not involved in this case, said those defendants who did not receive suspended sentences would have to go to prison before they could appeal, and defendants returning to Egypt would be arrested upon arrival.

According to Freedom House’s Dunne, the court decision was political, and not the result of a legitimate judicial proceeding.

“We were in the process of seeking registration at the time of the original raid – we were trying to comply with Egyptian law,” he said. “This has to be resolved politically, and that’s going to require involvement at the highest level of U.S. government.”

A crowd of police at street demonstrations in Algiers on Feb. 19, 2011.

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

Almost two years after popular uprisings swept across the Middle East and North Africa, rights advocates are warning that ominous backsliding is taking place in countries across the region and beyond.

“There are promising signs of democratic progress in a region long dominated by brutal authoritarian regimes. But does this dramatic breakthrough reflect a wider trend towards democracy and good governance around the world?” asks a new report by Freedom House, a rights group based here. “The findings … suggest that it does not.”

The annual flagship report looks at 35 countries (of more than 70 overall) that are considered low- and middle-performing governments, rating them through the end of last year on a range of openness indicators. “Declines far exceeded improvements … in both number and scale,” Freedom House reports, highlighting particularly “large drops” in government accountability and rule of law.

According to these indicators, post-uprising Egypt appears to be at a similar level or even more poorly than prior to the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, while the report also underscores deteriorations in Bahrain, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Meanwhile, Tunisia is lauded for having seen through some significant reforms.

“The overall deterioration … is cause for alarm among advocates of democracy, particularly given the prevailing impression that prodemocracy movements are gaining ground,” the Freedom House analysts write.

In analysing these findings, researchers point particularly to the weakness of governance institutions. Most of these countries are ostensibly democratic, holding at least irregular elections – and, indeed, the one indicator that Freedom House reports has risen in recent years is with regard to the holding of elections.

According to many observers, however, international development projects have been overly focused on elections, while paying far less attention to the spectrum of additional governance work necessary, particularly the strengthening of institutions.

“The upheaval that has struck the Middle East over the past two years, including last week, demonstrates the absolute necessity of thorough examination of governance institutions that influence democratic governance,” David J. Kramer, the president of Freedom House, said on Monday while unveiling the new report.

“The importance of democratic governance to successful development aid cannot be ignored. The Arab Spring reminded us that while governments in developing countries downplay the necessity of fully democratic institutions, and offer assurances that aid will be put towards encouraging its economic growth, the people of these countries understand the value of fair and open governance.”

Moment of accountability

For decades, international bilateral and multilateral donors were – and, indeed, largely remain – notably resistant to engaging in work that engages too closely with politics. Some institutions have even been specifically mandated to keep their development priorities elsewhere.

Today, however, there is an increasing understanding that most development-related goals cannot be reached without greater thought and funding given to governance-related issues.

The United States’ foreign-aid arm, USAID, was the first major donor to move into the political sphere, and even that took place only two decades ago. The decision drew widespread derision from other donors and scepticism from those who saw the move as an attempt by the United States to influence the politics of other countries.

Yet today, issues of transparency are being discussed in development circles around the world, and at all levels. “This is a moment of democratic accountability – an incredible moment,” says David Yang, with USAID.

“It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s in the air. Many development organisations have come to the conclusion that they cannot successfully, in most cases in a sustainable fashion, promote social and economic development without good governance, without human rights and without democratic governance.”

Still, even today, of the roughly 130 billion dollars that donors spends on official overseas assistance, less than 10 percent goes to governance programmes.

“I can’t say whether that’s adequate, but I can say that when professionals are asked the biggest factor in holding back development programmes, they usually cite poor governance,” says Brian Atwood, a longtime development expert and chair of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Development Assistance Committee.

Of that 9.5 percent, Atwood notes, citing his own research, just one percent is spent on legislatures, and another one percent on anti-corruption and transparency issues.

“One has to ask whether these percentages relate to need or, rather, relate to what are most comfortable for the donors,” he says. “We need to ask ourselves how this distribution supports the democratic governance agenda.”

Comfortable or not, some suggest that there is little reason to spend time wondering why certain development indicators are not being met, or are being met far more slowly than anticipated, when politics continues to be seen as a hot-button issue for development funders.

“Any time we’re talking about programming money, we’re talking politics in a society – influencing the power relationships in a society,” says Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a government-funded group here in Washington. “So we need to realise that, in the end, development is always a political process.”