CIVICUS, an NGO tracking civic freedoms, has put Poland on its human rights watchlist citing repression of protests, a crackdown on LGBTQI+ rights and attacks on independent media.
The organisation called on Thursday on the Europen Union to take urgent and immediate action to address fundamental rights violations .
Up to now, CIVICUS had Poland on its narrowed list which includes 40 countries in which it estimates that democratic freedoms, such as the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association, are increasingly being violated.
The rating is applied to other European countries including Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK.
The year 2020 tested democracy and civic freedoms in many ways. After the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic in March, governments took unprecedented actions, such as imposing curfews, restricting people’s movements, and limiting or banning gatherings. According to international law, some of these measures went beyond the permissible bounds for limiting rights during public health emergencies, bounds meant to ensure that such measures are kept “proportionate, necessary, and nondiscriminatory.”
In its latest report, the CIVICUS Monitor an online tool that tracks the space for civil society globally shows that the governments of EU states, Norway, and the United Kingdom (UK) restricted civic freedoms in subtle ways, often under the guise of fighting the pandemic. More specifically, the right to peaceful assembly came under attack. It comes as no surprise that authoritarian and far-right governments in countries like Hungary, Poland, and Sloven