12/05/2024

New Report Details How Pro-Palestinian Protests Are Suppressed in Democratic Countries

Engaging in activism or public debate concerning Israel has become incredibly fraught

A new report tracking the health of civic freedoms around the world identifies a notable trend: Crackdowns on Palestinian solidarity protests in every kind of society, from the most open to the least.

“Both the conflict itself and its impact on civic space… is one of the main takeaways of the year for us,” said Tara Petrović, an author of the report by CIVICUS Monitor, a global alliance of civil society groups, headquartered in Johannesburg. “We’ve seen expressions of solidarity, and we’ve seen repression of these expressions of solidarity at pretty much every corner of the globe."

Most protests are over issues close to home—food prices, national politics. The throngs that gathered outside South Korea's parliament on Tuesday were chanting against the president's abrupt imposition of martial law, which outlawed just such expressions. Had the decree survived the day, the space for civil society in South Korea might have dropped from its current assessment, "narrow" to "obstructed" in the next annual CIVICUS report, titled People Power Under Attack. The group assays civic space in 198 countries, from "open" to "repressed," and in its newly released report found that nearly one-tenth of the protests suppressed by authorities involved Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, or solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.