By Rowena McNaughton

 It was a Friday, 29 July. An endless throng of battered motor bikes and bicycles were clogging the sometimes bitumen, often dust, roads of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Fruit sellers had started to dismantle primitive wooden stalls in preparation to close for the day. Monks were walking towards watts for afternoon prayer. But as the majority of Cambodia’s inhabitants were engrossed in the tasks of daily life, its government, without fanfare, took another step forward to install  the country’s most dictatorial, and most appalling, association law, seen in the nation’s post Pol Pot era. Continue reading →

By Ciana-Marie Pegus

On Friday 12 August, CIVICUS hosted a lively discussion organised by teleconference on strengthening civil society and citizen action in the Caribbean. Seasoned civil society experts and dynamic young people came together to share their concerns and aspirations for the region.

CIVICUS Board Member and regional ambassador Amsale Maryam, Chairperson of the Jamaican Association of Development Agencies, welcomed the participants and reflected on both the diversity of the Caribbean as a multilingual, pluri-ethnic region with different political structures and levels of development and the commonality of the challenges faced by the Caribbean as small island states in the 21st century. The need for a development strategy in line with citizens’ interests was highlighted by insightful presentations delivered by friends of CIVICUS in the region. Continue reading →

By Amanda Atwood, Kubatana.net, Harare, Zimbabwe

At around midday on Wednesday 20 July, around 30 leading civil society activists and social media commentators convened online, speaking at length about a sustainable path forward to bridge the gap between online activists and civil society organisations (CSOs). The latter, that there is a gap that needs to be bridged between traditional CSOs and online activists, being unequivocally agreed.   Continue reading →

By Ramesh Man Tuladhar, Nepal Earth Society

It has been six weeks since the major political parties decided at the last minute to extend the tenure of the Constituent Assembly (CA) by three months.  The parties that kept the nation on tenterhooks until the very last minute did not seem to mind that the five-point deal they signed was ambiguous, and that there would be problems in implementing it. The parties seemed to have agreed to the deal out of sheer desperation and frustration rather than by any genuine intention to implement it. They may have asked themselves what would happen if the CA term were to expire and what the fate of the country would be when there is no elected body in place at the national level. Continue reading →

From a country so repressed that a dissenting word against government will result in a prison sentence, Yuri Dzhibladze*, Founder and President of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow, writes why the international community must not forget Belarus. Continue reading →