Today the CIVICUS Monitor Platform has been relaunched, together with a set of statistics resulted from all the updates which have been recorded up to the present day.
According to new findings, just 3% of people live in countries where space for civic activism – or civic space – is truly open. The first ever analysis of civic space covering all UN Member States shows people in 106 countries face serious threats when organising, speaking out and taking peaceful action to improve their societies.
The findings are taken from the new platform which provides quantitative ratings and narrative descriptions on civic space for every country, in addition to daily updates each weekday. They expose the real-life consequences of a startling retreat from participatory democracy which guarantees protection of fundamental civic freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly all over the world.
CIVICUS also releases today the Watch List, which draws attention to countries where there are serious and ongoing abuses of the rights to freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression. The Watch List will be constantly updated and it consists right now of 5 countries.
According to the released statistics, there are 20 countries in the world with closed civic space and just 26 with open civic space. Yet, there are 63 countries that fall in the narrowed category. There are 51 obstructed countries and 35 repressed ones in the world.
The results also indicate strong correlations between the level of openness of civic space and better human development, inequality and electoral democracy scores, as shown below.
Protecting civic space is vital to the health, stability and success of societies because it is only within an open civic space that people are free to share opinions, debate ideas and hold those in power to account. With the relaunch of the CIVICUS Monitor, global data on civic space can be compared with other measures of responsive societies.
There is also a clear correlation between countries’ ratings and their average Gini Index scores. With the exception of closed countries, the chart on the left shows that countries with more open civic space have less income inequality.
The graph on the right shows the relationship between countries’ ratings and the average Electoral Democracy Index Scores. Accordingly, more open civic space is correlated to freer and fairer elections.
As it is also indicated in the last graph on the left, civic space is strongly correlated with the income level. Thus, high levels of income are mre likey to be registered in open, free societies.
We invite you to read more here.
