Navigating Challenges and Opportunities. Civic Solidarity Platform Annual Meeting 2024

The Civic Solidarity Platform (CSP) Annual Meeting 2024 took place on October 5-6 in Warsaw, bringing together human rights defenders, advocates, and academy researchers dedicated to advancing human rights across the OSCE region. Together, we explored ways to tackle today’s most pressing challenges and foster resilient civic communities. We aim to help civic activists build alliances, strengthen mutual support and solidarity, and improve their influence on national and international human rights policy.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties, 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, gave opening remarks at the meeting. She spoke about today’s challenges, even in developed democracies negative tendencies are gaining strength, questioning the values of freedom and democracy. How do we reboot systems to ensure security measures are followed? And how do we endure? She ended her speech with Vaclav Havel quote: Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.” 

The event featured eight group discussions, several breakout group sessions, and a world café format for working group meetings. The meeting concluded with reflections and plans for 2024-2025 initiatives and cooperation among CSP members.

Together, we take coordinated action on specific human rights topics. Our members collectively dispatch teams to monitor unfolding crises and ensure a strategic response.

On the first day, participants summarize key trends and challenges in OSCE region.

• The climate crisis continues to exert multifaceted pressures on communities worldwide, intensifying extreme weather events, food and water shortages, economic disruptions, resource conflicts, and displacement. 

• Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) introduces potential human rights risks, particularly concerning privacy, discrimination, and the spread of disinformation. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life and governance, the implications for personal freedoms and equity call for closer scrutiny and regulation to prevent technology from exacerbating social inequalities.

• The rise of authoritarianism and populism is eroding public trust in democratic institutions, as these trends often exploit public discontent while sidelining human rights. Militarism is rising, as short-term national interests dominate the political landscape, weakening the international rule of law. This shift compromises the world’s ability to cooperate on critical global issues, such as climate change and migration, hunger and poverty, war and occupation.

• The perpetration of atrocity crimes remains a persistent challenge, often facilitated by third-party state complicity, with widespread impunity hampering accountability. Alongside these crimes, the concepts of ecocide and gender apartheid are being examened.

• Anti-rights movements pose significant threats to foundational rights, challenging women’s rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, and reproductive freedoms. 

• Human rights defenders are also increasingly subject to harassment, facing attacks, stigmatization, and surveillance. The growing restrictive migration policies further complicate the global landscape, often underpinned by populist and nationalist agendas that hinder human rights protections for refugees and migrants.

• As more human rights defenders are forced into exile or criminalized, particularly under national security and counter-terrorism laws, civil society faces new constraints. 

On the second day, participants outlined several key opportunities within the human rights landscape. Both OSCE states and NGOs demonstrate a continued commitment to international human rights law, as reflected by efforts from some states to evade scrutiny while others support these frameworks. This dynamic underscores a shared interest in maintaining human rights mechanisms, even amidst risks faced by defenders engaging with these bodies.

Artificial intelligence present positive opportunities, enabling better advocacy, data collection, and content moderation while also driving economic efficiency.

The participants discuss the evolution of international law, where new frameworks are being explored to hold violators accountable.