Amnesty International calls on countries to roll back anti-NGO laws News
Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Amnesty International calls on countries to roll back anti-NGO laws

Amnesty International on Monday condemned the growing use of discriminatory legal frameworks by governments across the Americas to systematically target civil society organizations, a trend it described as regressive and alarming.

In a new report, Amnesty noted that practices by governments in Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela imposed excessive restrictions on civil society groups, undermining their capacity to serve communities and secure adequate funding to carry out their operations. Many of these laws were adopted without proper public consultation or democratic process required to protect the very citizens they claim to regulate.

Rosalía Vega, director of Amnesty International Paraguay, commented on these growing threats:

Freedom of association is a gateway to the exercise of other rights. When civil society organizations are dismantled, entire communities lose support, representation and avenues to seek justice. Without a strong and independent civil society, people cannot enjoy or defend their human rights.

Often, legislative language used in these countries contains ambiguous terms that open large loopholes for potential abuse, enabling authorities to weaponize the law against critics, journalists, and civil society groups without facing judicial oversight or accountability.

For instance, an anti-NGO law in Venezuela, passed by former president Nicolás Maduro’s government, is criticized for its stringent requirements on NGOs to receive government approval to operate. The bill offers broad discretion to authorities to deny NGO authorization based on funding source information. This effectively allows the government to conflate foreign funding with subversion, using ill-defined political criteria or unsubstantiated accusations of terrorism as a pretext to silence critical voices and undermine civil society networks and organizations.

Peru’s anti-NGO law has also been criticized for empowering the government to exercise authority over organizations that receive foreign funding, allowing the state to dictate the internal agendas of civil society under the threat of permanent dissolution. Amnesty has cited concerns that the law would adversely impact minority groups and has called on governments to immediately amend laws that violate the right to freedom of association.

he right to freedom of association is a fundamental human right enshrined under Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

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