Civil society and rights defenders face a range of obstacles and restrictions in EU member states that limit their ability to carry out their activities. Still, a systematic and comprehensive monitoring system to capture the state of play of civic space in the EU, and support the European Commission’s work towards an enabling environment, has so far been lacking. ECNL has joined forces with 8 CSOs from across Europe to set up a monitoring methodology, embracing all complexities that come from different national contexts, using our collective expertise in the monitoring field.
We will focus on developments in Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland and Romania with the following organisations:
The 2-year-long project is financed under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV), managed by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. We will develop a monitoring methodology for the civil society environment and an early warning system to alert EU institutions on threats to civic space in member states. These will be created based on the experience with existing EU guidelines, CSO Meter, (a tool developed by the ECNL and partners from the Eastern Partnership region) the European Civic Forum’s Civic Space Watch.
Once up and running, the new system is expected to increase understanding of how new trends uphold or threaten EU values and standards, making the findings comparable between areas, countries and from year to year. A much-needed system in today's European Union, given the challenges of increasingly shrinking civic space.
This project is coordinated by the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law Stichting (ECNL) within the framework of the MACS Project, funded by the European Union.