Just as human rights need civil society, civil society organisations need their human rights to be protected to carry out their work.
This is from May 2018 report summary from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) on the different types of challenges faced by civil society organisations working on human rights in the EU.
The report finds that civil society organisations (CSO) face challenges in the following areas:
- Freedom of association: registration of NGOs, lobbying regulations and advocacy restrictions; counter-terrorism and emergency laws; changes in legal status, liability of officers and members, and scope of activities; public interest litigation and entry restrictions
- Freedom of opinion, expression and information: defamation legislation and restrictions on the content of speech
- Freedom of peaceful assembly: policing of assemblies, simultaneous assemblies; counter-terrorism and emergency laws.
