For the third year in a row, Taiwan has been named as the only country in Asia with an open civic space, according to a report by a global civil rights monitor, which was released on Tuesday.
In its “People Power Under Attack 2020” annual report, the South Africa-based non-governmental organization Civicus rated 196 countries in five categories — open, narrow, obstructed, repressed and closed — based on their level of basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press and of speech.
Taiwan was one of 42 countries worldwide, and the only one in Asia, to be ranked in the open category.
Out of 25 Asian countries in the report, four were rated as closed — China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam — while nine were categorized as repressed and nine as narrowed. Civic space in Japan and South Korea was rated as narrowed.
According to the report, Taiwan hosted one of the few Pride marches around the world this year in June, giving the country’s LGBT community a chance to visibly assert their rights in the public square.
Taiwan also established a National Human Rights Commission in August of this year, and granted press credentials to some 22 foreign journalists who had been forced to leave China, the report noted.
However, it also expressed concern about the rights of migrant workers, overly-broad laws used by the government to combat misinformation, and protest laws which restrict people’s right to hold peaceful assemblies near certain government facilities.
Meanwhile, the only Asian country to move in this year’s ratings was the Philippines, which had its category downgraded from obstructed to repressed.
The reason was a decline in fundamental freedoms, the report said, citing the government’s closure of leading broadcaster ABS-CBN, the conviction of a prominent journalist on “cyberlibel” charges, and deteriorating conditions for both government critics and human rights defenders.
Josef Benedict, a Civicus researcher, said that human rights abuses continued to be the norm in much of Asia this year, with more than 90 percent of the region’s population living in countries classified as closed, repressed or obstructed.
According to the report, some of the most common means of curtailing the civic space in Asia were the use of restrictive laws to stifle dissent, the censorship of journalists and government critics, the harassment of activists and journalists, and crackdowns on protests.
Among the few positive developments in the region this year, the report noted, were Afghan authorities’ commitment to set up a protection mechanism for human rights defenders and a court ruling in Indonesia that the government’s decision to impose an internet blackout in the West Papua region in 2019 had violated the law.
By Lu Hsin-hui and Matthew Mazzetta/ ANN