A/HRC/44/50 to identify common trends across regions, share lessons, explore solidarity strategies and build new alliances. IV. Context A. Decade of compounding challenges 42. Over the past 10 years, the world has faced a series of severe challenges: growing poverty and inequality, violent extremism, conflict and war, digital transformation, natural disasters and climate change, to name a few. The need for assembly and association rights as an avenue for people to work together through peaceful means towards solving these problems should have been evident. After all, throughout history and across cultures the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association have enabled individuals to address many of world’s most difficult challenges. Civil society gave the world the anti-slavery and anti-apartheid movements; the transnational advocacy campaigns against poverty and inequality; the women’s suffrage movements; the unions that fought and won rights for workers; the environmentalists who worked and continue to work to protect the planet and climate; and the movements that ignited transitional democracies.40 43. Instead of listening and responding to people’s needs and expanding the ability of civil society to contribute to addressing those challenges, however, many governments around the world chose to use these crises to silence independent voices and increase their own power. The period 2010–2019 saw the erosion of democracy and civic freedoms in a large number of countries, including established democracies, States in transition and autocratic countries. The most recent Global State of Democracy report by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) concluded that the share of democracies experiencing democratic erosion had seen a consistent increase in recent decades and had more than doubled in the last decade compared with the previous one. 41 The report also observed that democratic backsliding had become more frequent in the last decade and that, in the same time period, non-democratic regimes had persisted and deepened their autocratization. 44. The aspects of democracy that have eroded most are those related to civic space. According to Freedom House, 2019 was the fourteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom, with the majority of the countries suffering a net decline in the past decade. 42 Similarly, the most recent report by CIVICUS concluded that in the last decade, the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression had experienced consistent backsliding across the world and that 40 per cent of the world’s population now lived in countries where freedoms of assembly, association and expression were repressed. 43 45. The decline in public freedoms is reflected in the increase in limitations to associational life across the world. The mandate of the Special Rapporteur has extensively documented this trend, looking at the rise in: the adoption of laws related to national security, counter-terrorism and public order; the criminalization of peaceful protest; the indiscriminate and excessive use of force to counter or repress peaceful protest; undue barriers to funding; stigmatization of and attacks against civil society actors; and censorship and surveillance of the digital space.44 Particularly salient over the last decade is how States increased their use of digital technology to silence, survey and harass dissidents, political opposition, human rights defenders, activists and protesters, and to manipulate public opinion. 45 40 41 42 43 44 45 12 A/HRC/35/28. IDEA, The Global State of Democracy 2019: Addressing the Ills, Reviving the Promise (Stockholm, 2019), pp. 15 and 32. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2020: A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy (Washington, D.C., 2020). CIVICUS. People Power Under Attack (December 2019), p. 5. Available at: https://civicus.contentfiles.net/media/assets/file/GlobalReport2019.pdf. A/HRC/38/34. A/HRC/41/41.