United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, February 2017.

“2016 The Year in Review – Headline after headline brought us news of political upheaval, war, terrorism, health crises, endemic corruption, environmental disaster, economic turmoil and more. The pace and magnitude of the change and adversity was, at times – to use Merriam-Webster’s 2016 word of the year – “surreal.” But there was another side to this story, one with a much more hopeful tone: Despite its myriad troubles, 2016 was also a year where people came out in nearly unprecedented numbers in an attempt to address our problems – through organizing in their communities, through protest, through political engagement, through labor unions and more. It was, in other words, a year where assembly and association rights took center stage as a tool for fixing what appeared to be a crumbling world order. And the fact that people exercised these rights in such large numbers was no small feat. The long-lamented phenomenon of “closing space” for civic engagement is certainly real, and it spread dramatically in 2016. A recent report from CIVICUS found that roughly 85% of the world’s population lives in countries where the rights to expression, assembly or association have faced serious challenges. And in many of those countries, the challenges are of the highest order. Ask protesters in Ethiopia, where more than 600 people have been killed by security forces since large-scale political demonstrations began in 2015. Ask the family of South Korean Baek Nam-gi, a 69-year-old protester who succumbed to his injuries last September after being knocked down by a police water cannon in late 2015. Or ask the numerous civil society members in Egypt who withstood a wave of arrests, asset freezes, travel bans and other harassment in 2016 in retaliation for their work defending human rights. Such examples abounded in 2016, with the footprint of oppression covering most of the world, from Turkey to France to the United States to Malaysia to Burundi and beyond. Yet people’s courage in the face of this repression was unflappable: Protesters for electoral independence in Kenya turned out week after week, even after being badly beaten by police. Environmental rights defenders in Honduras persisted, despite the shocking murder of their compatriot Berta Cáceres in March. And civil society in countries such as Thailand, Burundi and the By nearly any standard and in virtually every corner of the globe, 2016 was one of the most tumultuous years the world has seen since the end of the Cold War…”