As EU lawmakers turn their fire on “foreign-funded” NGOs, Natacha Kazatchkine warns that a coordinated witch-hunt is starving civil society of money, legitimacy and space to defend basic rights.
Rightwing groups in the European Parliament have extended for six months a controversial committee investigating NGOs that receive EU funding.
It’s time to recognise that NGOs and civic space are not simply “shrinking” across Europe. As our report shows, it is being actively restricted by anti-rights actors seeking to promote their agendas, silence debate, and exclude communities whose rights they seek to undermine.
Why do some centre-right European People’s Party MEPs, supported by the far-right, continue to centre the debate on funding for NGOs? The real end goal here is discrediting and defunding NGOs in order to sideline them even further in political decision-making.