In the first episode of season 12, recorded at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Shalini Randeria speaks with Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. Romero examines how authoritarianism, surveillance, criminalisation and funding constraints are shrinking civic space and creating a climate of fear and apathy. The conversation addresses the repression of pro-Palestine activism on university campuses, the challenges facing UN Special Rapporteurs and the double-edged role of digital technology. Finally, Romero calls for young people to be included meaningfully in policymaking rather than reduced to token participation.
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S12E01 Gina Romero: Restrictions affecting Right to Assembly and Youth Activism
[00:00:00]
Welcome back to Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. We continue with a new episode every month in season 12 as well. I am Shalini Randeria, Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, Germany, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
This is the first episode of season twelve of Democracy in Question, which was recorded in Oslo at the Nobel Peace Centre. I am very pleased to welcome today Gina Romero. She is the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Right to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association since 2024. Her mandate is to defend and expand these rights that are foundational to democratic participation and to address the structural threats to civil society. It is her responsibility to present annual thematic reports to the United Nations Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly, conduct official country visits and issue country-specific statements, the latest being on Venezuela and Iran.
Earlier, Gina had co-founded and served for nearly ten years as Executive Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy where she engaged with governments, civil society, academia and the private sector in fifty countries across Euope, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Over the past 15 years she has overseen 9 Universal Periodic Review reports, some 450 reports on violations of civic-space-related rights mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Gina and I begin by discussing the climate of fear and apathy due to growing clamp down on the freedom of assembly and association worldwide that are having a chilling effect on civic activism in general and on protest movements in particular. I ask her to address not only the legal restrictions being imposed on activists but also the various kinds of state repression that they face. We then turn to her own engagement and recommendations around recent pro-Palestinian activism on universities campuses the world over.
We also talk about the possibilities to counter digital tools used for the surveillance of civil society that are eroding civic space. And finally, we discuss some of the recommendations in the latest report she has issued titled “Youth Activism: From Systematic Exclusion to Real Participation[1]”, which she will present in October to the UN General Assembly. Gina and I were together last week at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo for a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates with young pro-democracy activists from the USA, Kenya, Serbia, Brazil and Nepal. I ask her to share with us some of her insights from these discussions.
Shalini: Gina, thank you so much for making the time for this interview. It's a great pleasure and privilege to have you with me on the podcast. [2]
Gina: Oh, thank you, Shalini, for the invitation. I'm really glad to be here with you and your audience.
Shalini: Gina You've described, the shrinking of civic space today as an “existential threat” to the right of assembly and the right of association that is much more than a series of separate national crises of an authoritarian clampdown on civil and political rights in individual countries. And you've sounded alarm about the compounding detrimental effects of securitization, surveillance, digital surveillance, but also the collapse of funding for independent civic activism, which are all operating simultaneously across regions.[00:01:00] So could you discuss how these factors are reinforcing each other?
Gina: Oh, yes. Thanks. What we are seeing right now, this existential threat that you mentioned, it's fueled by three global trends and several tactics that different actors, including governments and non-state actors, are using to curtail freedoms and rights. The three trends in a nutshell are: the backsliding in democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, which at the core has a problem with allowing dissent to exist. It could be political dissent. It could be social, cultural dissent. This is the main factor that is harming the rights of assembling of association. The second trend is the increase in wars, occupation, genocide, and the recurrent use of violence to solve problems. And then the third trend is the deterioration of multilateralism.
So now that we have a reduction of democracy, an increasing of authoritarianism, an increasing of violence as a way to take decisions, multilateral systems are not actually doing what they are meant to do: mediating conflicts and upholding institutions. So those three trends are reinforced, or are driven by several tactics that governments are using that together are creating a vacuum in which civil society and dissenting voices, including people that go to the streets to protest, are actually being completely curtailed to exercise their rights.
And these tactics are many: The adoption of restricting laws, for example, to portray civil society organizations and other actors as “foreign agent” or “enemies of the [00:03:00] nation”, or traitors, and so on. What they do is to fuel narratives of these different actors to actually- increase the rejection that society can give to them and make it easy the criminalization of their work.
We also have the increase of surveillance, as you mentioned. We are living in a world in which transnational crime has in- increased. And is also being paired with a narrative that is increasingly creating different views on why society needs security and how the increase of security sometimes needs to come, like in quotes, with the “restriction of freedoms”. That is not true, but that is what the government sell to people.
They are also making people buy this idea of increasing the surveillance, increasing the persecution, even the online harassment, for many different actors. And all this is eroding the possibility to assemble, to exercise freedom of speech and to associate, to go to the streets to protest, and so on. So, this is why it's an existential threat and this is why this is also chilling the new generation sometimes to act, but also is chilling citizens that now don't want to participate in different political activities because they are going to be surveilled, or because they are going to be heavily repressed, which is happening worldwide.
Shalini: We'll come back to the restrictions and also the fear which these governments are inducing. [00:05:00] One of the instruments which you mentioned, the tactic I want to pick out so that we understand it a little better, is the term which you used, “foreign agents”. You've drawn a very interesting direct historical parallel between this foreign agent legislation that is being used by many authoritarian governments to delegitimize activists today and a decades-old law in Guatemala against communism. Older repressive laws are being repackaged and rebranded across time and in being adapted to new context as authoritarian governments are increasingly borrowing these instruments also today from one another.
Gina: There's two things that we can talk here about. One is the general use of narratives, and the imposition of certain narratives, to curtail the possibility for dissent to thrive. And that is not new. We have seen the use of propaganda in many different contexts from different types of regimes to justify criminalization and persecution. The “foreign agent” or foreign influence narrative has been there historically also in many different contexts. So [00:07:00] not only Guatemala, but in Latin America, in the '90s also.
I am Colombian In the early 2000s also the president of the country was using the same exact narrative that some governments are using now to persecute civil society. They were calling us terrorists, for example. All civil society and other actors that were part of the political, social, cultural dissent were targeted with “foreign agent” or foreign influence links, or with [00:08:00] terrorism links even before the 9/11.
Now what we have is a worldwide spread of the use of these narratives that then become laws. So we have a wave of “foreign agent” or foreign influence laws worldwide. We have also transparency and accountability laws that are misleading to just persecute certain actors, including civil society. We also have some laws that are putting the stress on security against freedom. And we have changes of the penal codes, for example, to increase the penalties for people who go to streets to protest and so on and so forth. And now we have social media, and the algorithms that always push more for hatred instead of portraying the reality of what is happening in the field. So, this is why it now is more complex phenomena and more difficult to tackle.
Shalini: I come to the question of social media platforms a little later, but I want to stay with this idea of foreign funding which you were mentioning, because, of course, civic activism requires resources. And what we have seen in the last years is a constraining of resources. The US government under the Trump administration dismantled the USAID, the [00:10:00] bilateral aid agency of the US government. But all over Europe, we have seen the budgets for bilateral aid agencies getting smaller and smaller. Domestic funding streams are either not available, or if governments are willing to fund civil society actors, NGOs, then only the ones they can co-opt, or the ones they can use for providing certain services which the government is not providing. So, it's one means of privatizing state services.
But public funding, bilateral transnational public funding, which used to be a mainstay of civil society organizations in most of the global South, is also problematic for two reasons. It's short-term, it's project-driven, it shifts with all the donor priorities [00:11:00] shifting suddenly to some other issue. Because it's not long-term and sustainable, it can also erode the trust between NGOs and local communities, and a lot of philanthropy does not want to fund social movements.
Now, you very rightly make the argument in view of this very difficult situation that the only lifeline probably available for ecological justice activism, human rights, pro-democracy movements is international funding. My worry about that is that if it comes from abroad, the financial support for these movements, will it not help the authoritarian regimes to delegitimize these as [00:12:00] as “puppets of foreign forces”?
Gina: Yeah, that is exactly what is happening. I do believe that civil society in general, and social movements in particular, are at very difficult crossroads now. Because internally there is not funding available, or is not trust even to give. Because in some places certain movements have been classified as terrorists, for example, so nobody can give a penny. And then in other places, constant narratives that these movements are bad for whatever reason, bad for the nation, or they are spies, or “foreign agents”, make the society in general that could give some money or time, for example, volunteer time, or in kind [00:13:00] contributions, they just don't want to do it because there is a shadow above these movements because misinformation, disinformation. And that exactly, as you say, gives the only avenue for these movements of foreign funding.
And there is this very wrong idea that receiving funding from abroad means that you are following the ideas of an external actor. That is not the truth. Most of the time, different donors that give funding for civil society, or for movements, they do it because they want to support the objectives of those movements. It's not because they want to impose anything. But the narrative that is built around different funders makes everybody [00:14:00] distrust and break also the movement.
For example, climate justice agendas that need to be addressed by many different actors. When you are targeting these actors, or the solidarity movement against genocide in Palestine, when you are targeting them with narratives that are mischievous and misleading, what you are doing is just breaking solidarity, breaking the possibility for individuals to act together, to come together. And this is why it's an existential threat for the rights of assembly and of association that are rooted in the possibility of individuals to come together and foster trust.
So indeed, it's a [00:15:00] crossroad for the movements, and it's a crossroad also for civil society and for donors. But then as you say, there is no possibility to do all this work without funding because people need funding for mobilizing, for communication, for paying salaries for the people devoted to the movement, for training, even providing safety, security support, for example, for digital security. By severing this possibility to get support, movements are heavily weakened. And powerful authoritarian actors, or certain private actors don't want the movement to succeed.
Shalini: But to shift the focus a little [00:16:00] bit, Gina, it's not just that the movements are encountering so much of pushback. You yourself in your own work as a UN Special Rapporteur have also encountered a lot of obstacles. And in that context, you've publicly named the lack of engagement of some governments (China, India, Iran, and Russia), who have not engaged with your mandate. They've denied your request for visits. They have not answered the formal inquiries that you've made. Are there any real consequences when a state simply ignores the inquiries of a UN Special Rapporteur? Your mandate, of course, depends heavily on the voluntary cooperation of [00:17:00] states. The choice that you would have, in a way, is between quiet diplomacy and public condemnation. You've chosen in some cases to go public and name and shame countries. When is the one more useful, and when is quiet backdoor diplomacy without much media attention the better option?
Gina: Two very complex questions. So, in the first one, I do believe that increasingly we are seeing, and when I say we, all special rapporteurs are seeing a lack of engagement from most countries. It's not only the usual suspects. For example, I've been trying for a year already to get a visit, an official visit to the UK and my letter hasn't been even replied. I've been also trying to go [00:18:00] to other countries that may have several problems, but that are not autocracies. I'm talking about Kenya, for example, I'm talking about Thailand also not replying for my request for visits. Increasingly we are seeing actors that are not fulfilling their need to engage with the system that they own, or created. So, that is a big problem.
It's difficult to talk about consequences because in each case, everything works differently. For some countries, the name and shaming don't work. If you expose them, they just don't care that the [00:19:00] UN, or the UN special rapporteurs, say something about them. But then journalists, civil society, and even sometimes the judiciary use our work for national actions.
And in some cases that has a bigger role than the international community. In other cases some authoritarian countries and some totalitarian countries, they don't care about the judiciary because they have completely co-opted the judiciary or completely co-opted the parliaments. And some of them hate when we mention it in our reports, or when we do public letters, or when we talk to international media. So, it really depends.
I cannot assess when one is more successful than others. I play with both quiet diplomacy and with public condemnation. And also I try to push a [00:20:00] little bit for peer accountability, which is the only consequence that we can have right now in this system as weak as it is. When we have some governments asking others, for example, in their universal periodic review processes about certain measures that they have been promising for the past 10 years, that creates a little bit more pressure. And then international media sometimes also helps to push. I do a lot of things that you don't see in social media, or you don't see in my reports that sometimes work. Sometimes they don't, and then I need to go public.
What it is always important for me is how local actors, when it is possible, when it is still a democratic space, how local actors use our work, because that is the more important thing. And in other cases, I try to connect with [00:21:00] regional bodies, for example, with the Inter-American Commission, with the African Commission, with the European Commission and Court, to try to bring forward some of these discussions.
But, Shalini, unfortunately, the multilateral system is so weak now that sometimes I don't even think that is a greater solution. And that is what worries me because that opens the door for people to take to the streets. And that always creates a harsh and violent response from the government.
Shalini: There is another aspect I want to talk to you about, Gina, where you've adopted a very interesting, different strategy. You've had [00:22:00] direct consultations with so many people involved in the whole question of campus protests. It has become a very controversial issue of late particularly because of the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses worldwide. And you have tried your best to ensure that university campuses remain protected spaces for peaceful protest and for academic freedom. Let me quote you on this, where you say that, "The brutal repression of the university-based protest movement is posing a profound threat to democratic systems and institutions. It risks alienating an entire generation." I, as a former Rector of the Central European University, am particularly interested in this topic. Could you talk about your direct engagement with academic institutions like Harvard or Columbia University on campus protest rights? And [00:23:00] about your October 24, 2024 statement, which you issued based on consultations with 150 people in over 30 countries, so that we get a sense of the findings of your report[3], but also some of the main recommendations that you make there to protect academic freedom and university autonomy. As you very rightly point out, these are the important spaces in which the younger generation can practice critical debate, respectful dissent, which are absolutely crucial to the functioning of, and flourishing, of any liberal democracy.
Gina: Democracy and human rights are actions that need to be learned. And institutions, education institutions, universities, schools, and so on are the best place for learning this. But [00:24:00] precisely because of the closing of civic space and the possibility of the exercise of rights in university settings, we are losing that. And that is one of the biggest alerts since I took the mandate.
Specifically, on the pro-Palestine movement, when I took the mandate on the 1st of May 2024, the mandate emails were flooded with allegations of human right violations in universities worldwide for the pro-Palestinian movement and against genocide. So, what I did was to try to reach out with different groups of students, with different universities, in different contexts to try to understand what was going on, and especially to understand which was the role that the universities were playing in many different settings, [00:25:00] fully private universities, also public universities, mixed ownership universities.
This is not a report. It's just a set of recommendations. What I found is that through 2024 and 2025, and at the end of 2023. the majority of protests that were happening in universities were peaceful. Occupations, mobilization, assemblies, student groups, vigils, many other ways that students were using to express their opinion about what was happening in Gaza were mainly peaceful. And yet they were heavily repressed by most universities. And we are talking about universities in the US, [00:26:00] universities in many countries in Europe. I collected information in the Netherlands, in the UK, in France, in Germany. Also, I collected information from universities in Australia, in the Middle East, which was like the most surprising part, in Canada, some very little in Latin America.
I saw that it was a trend of a heavy attack on this peaceful protest. And also an impossibility from the university to establish clear, constructive paths of communication and engaging with the movements and to coordinate actions to respond to their demands. Initially the movement was more for solidarity for Gaza. But soon enough, this student movement started asking universities for very concrete actions [00:27:00] For example, about investments in guns providers or in Israeli companies. Some students that were doing their PhDs in Arab studies were expelled from universities.
Even academic activities like conferences that were talking about genocide were also canceled or heavily restricted. So, it is not only about protest, it is also about universities being a place in which the actual production of knowledge is free, and can [00:28:00] also talk to the reality that we are living in society. I found so many violations: arbitrary prohibitions and blanket prohibitions on protests, for example, disciplinary sanctions, the expelling of university students, and even professors that were supporting them. And also, unfortunately, a lot of hatred, online violence, doxing, and so on.
I went to several universities in the US, or even when talking about this situation with students in the UK, for example, there are a lot of mental health issues. There's a lot of trauma because they couldn't bear the burden of this harassment. First what I did was collecting this information and provide some concrete [00:29:00] recommendations for universities worldwide[4], which is the statement you were talking about. And after that, I started engaging with some universities. So, I did go to Harvard last year and to Columbia to meet some students because I couldn't meet with the university itself. I've been also reaching out to several universities in the UK that had disciplinary sanctions to some students to actually ask what was happening. What I have requested to most of them is just to open up these rules on freedom of expression and to include the standards on freedom of assembly.
Where are the standards for the right to protest? The other trend that I found when analyzing what was happening in universities is that the universities were changing the rules every day, and that will leave the students without clarity on [00:30:00] what they're able to do or not. The students that were doing the encampments are no longer in the universities because they already graduated, and the new students don't want to engage. I was in Bristol recently talking to students, and they were telling me that the students don't want to participate in any type of activity now of a political component. And last time I went to Columbia, it was so silent that I felt the chilling effect that all this is creating. So, we are silencing some generations, and we are losing universities as the heart of the learning how to exercise rights and how to also exercise democracy, which is the saddest thing I've seen since I am the [00:31:00] Rapporteur.
Shalini: Another trend that we are seeing at the moment is that it's not only governments, or in this particular case, universities, which are restricting these freedoms, but also powerful tech companies, which are in an unholy alliance with states and are enabling the surveillance of citizens. Digital tools are being used actively by states in order to shrink civic space. And if I put it in your own words, you say, "We can no longer afford for technology to be a bystander or, worse, an accomplice to the attacks on these fundamental freedoms." Now, your answer to this is to call for civil society to be treated as a design partner in security and in technological governance frameworks.
What incentives do you think tech companies would have [00:32:00] to do so? They are interested in profits, and they are interested in extracting data. Why would they partner with civil society, and how could we bring them to help protect civic space? Have you engaged with any of these companies? How have they reacted? I can see them paying lip service or they may dismiss it as utopian. And this is really the dilemma because we would need to bring pressure on governments to regulate these powerful companies, but the governments are in bed with the corporations to restrict freedoms. So, we have two actors who have no interest in cooperating to respect the human rights that is your mandate to protect and to deepen.
Gina: Yeah, this is a [00:33:00] very complex situation, but I do believe that we have certain options. Even on campuses, we saw an increase of surveillance on campus and outside campus. We saw the installment of cameras with facial recognition. And the problem with this is that this ecosystem is composed of many different actions that reinforce the use that governments do with the technology. So, for example, the facial recognition that is powered by artificial intelligence. But in other cases, it's also the design of these technologies that [00:34:00] are fundamentally against human rights. For example the spyware. I've been talking all week with students from Serbia that have a new case, or new scandal, of the use of Pegasus against them. So, there are certain technologies like, for example, spyware, that are fundamentally from their design against human rights. Those need to be completely banned. We need to advance in national courts, but also in the international community to do that banning. But it is different when we are talking about social media and the use of social media to spread disinformation, misinformation.
Social media is also being to surveil, and to collect information on people that they consider are suspects. Sometimes a suspect is just an activist. So, the police is changing who a suspect could be. Instead of looking for crime, they are looking for activism and opposition and so on. But we are seeing, for example, the case of the very recent agreement that META is having in the US courts because of child safety cases. It's interesting because it shows two things. One, companies can be regulated and companies can be held accountable by the national courts. This is very important. But on the [00:36:00]other side, the devil is always in the details. And when you see the details of this agreement, there is nothing related to, for example, the design of these applications and this technology. The bigger burden of the protection of the child is on the child and on the parents.
They are not talking about how to do this application and this technology safety by design. How do we ensure that the youth are being allowed to express, for example, online. It is always about the user and never about the companies. So, this is a bittersweet analysis of this specific case. But what it shows you is that companies can be held accountable. What we need now is not waiting for every country to do certain agreements. This is why international community exists, and why multilateralism exists. So, the idea is for multilateral actors to put some stop on certain developments, like for example, artificial intelligence.
At some point the incentive that you were asking me about, it's [00:38:00] always the requests and the obligations for international courts and for regional courts and for the international community to control and regulate the work of these companies. I don't have a very close relationship with the companies. Meta is the only company that always replies my emails and sits down to talk to me. I do believe that we need to sit down more with the companies. But it is important always to figure out if all these technologies are safe by design. And that they have a specific due diligence including also a human rights perspective in all the cycle of the relation between governments and tech companies, between the purchase of technology, the use of that technology, and the monitoring of the harm that this technology is having. The harm is not only specifically [00:39:00] on child safety or on the right of education, but this is also affecting deeply and eroding the possibility of exercise freely the right of assembly and of association. Securitization and misuse of surveillance, is affecting our agency to decide who do we meet, what do we say, who do we engage with, and which activities we are involved to. So, we are in a very interesting moment in which we need to decide collectively as humanity very important decisions about issues like, for example, generative AI. Governments alone cannot do it individually. We need to rely on multilateral system for that.
Shalini: This brings me to your latest report, which you are going to present to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October, the report titled “Youth Activism From Systematic Exclusion to Real [00:40:00] Participation”. You highlight the fact that some twenty-five major youth movements have proved to be real catalysts of social and political change and have opened civic spaces nationally and transnationally in the past decade. What are the major gaps that you identify which still lead to the exclusion of youth from the next steps of policymaking once the protests have stopped and their input into decision-making needs to be institutionalized?
Many of the movements you have been looking at have moved very well from the screen to the street. They started mobilizing in the virtual sphere using digital technologies to their advantage to come [00:41:00] together. They use them quite effectively to propagate content and memes, as we saw in the Cockroach Janta Party recently in India, and in Nepal in the Gen Z movement with whose activists you've also been talking this week. They were also very effective at using social media.
Gina: The report is on youth activism that goes beyond protest. And this is something that is very important for me to highlight from the report precisely because of the prominence of this youth led and Gen Z protest. Now several actors are only thinking that youth only protest, right? That the only thing that youth do is just to go to the streets and stay there and protest against government. But that's not the truth. Youth also do so many other things. They lead projects for connecting with communities, they train their peers, they do advocacy, they volunteer for social and cultural actions, et cetera. Protest is one of the [00:43:00] tactics that they use for activism. But then again precisely because of this Gen Z protest, now we have a lot of attention on what youth has been doing in the streets.
You just mentioned the Cockroach Party in India. We have the movement in Serbia that has been also pushing for accountability and for electoral change. Some of the gaps that I highlighted in the report are related to this bigger idea of youth activism. One of the gaps is that participation of youth is often tokenism. Youth is used like a ticking box in a long list of requirements for participation that at the end don't end in anything. At the end, the voices of the youth are collected, but then they are not [00:44:00] used in decision-making. So, the idea is to push forward for better processes of not only consulting youth, but then including them in the design of public agendas, the design of public policy, their implementation, and the monitoring and evaluation. This is one of the gaps.
The other gap is that unfortunately, and this is not new, youth are being targeted with certain narratives. That they are lazy, that they are troublemakers, or that they don't care about anything, or when they care, get violent, that they are also terrorists. Also, in some cases, they are being called “foreign agents”. And these narratives are fueling also the restriction of their possibility for exercise their rights. But also they are fueling a lot of violence and criminalization of their actions, not only by persecuting their organizations and even closing [00:45:00] or restricting funding for their organization, but in some cases excessive use of force against protest, which is the third gap. We have thousands of youth, including minors, that have been killed in the streets when protesting. And we still have hundreds of youth worldwide that are still in jail, even in some cases they have been judged in terrorism courts for participating in protests, or they are facing very long and harsh sentences. And we have lack of accountability of all the grave human right violations that creates also a chilling effect on future participation. We also have an increase of surveillance against youth that we already mentioned.
And one of the biggest points is that [00:46:00] precisely because civic space is reduced, and civil society is heavily persecuted, civil society sometime is the safety network for youth movements. Civil society sometime give them funding, or helps them to coordinate, or helps them to take their cases to courts when their rights have been violated. When civic space is curtailed youth movements also are affected. But also the digital civic space is very unprotected. And one of the major things that have been that is shrinking the civic space for youth activism right now is beyond online surveillance, the bans of the use of social media. And youth are not consulted even though they are the [00:47:00] ones who use social media the most.
Shalini: To wrap up, could you say something about the general insights that you have gained this week? We are both in Oslo at the Nobel Peace Center where we've been meeting with youth leaders from various countries, who have been discussing their experiences of activism. What insights you've gained from your conversations with them, and how do you think we could further transnational solidarity for protecting democracy?[00:42:00] As you wrote very rightly last year in an article, "The future of global democracy, peace, and sustainable development depends on a vibrant, autonomous civil society." What could we do to further that?
Gina: It is so beautiful for me to see that even though they are heavily persecuted and affected in their mental health because of the violence and the harassment that they receive, at the same time, they keep doing activism. Their resilience, their strength, it's amazing. And this is one of the things that I take from these days in Oslo. I met these 14 fantastic youth from different countries that have been doing so much, that they are passionate, that their activism is like a moral commitment to their communities and their countries and their agendas. Being here several days with them, [00:48:00]listening to their ideas, and to their struggles, and the commitment, and how heavily impacted they are by the violence that they have been receiving, it is actually something that has filled my heart but also has given me a lot more hope and strength for keeping on doing the work.
Shalini: Gina, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure to share some of your insights into not only the restrictions which civil society activism is facing, but also to share your hopes about the kinds of changes that are possible, and that we think the younger generation will be able to make with larger international support.
Gina: Thank you for the invitation. I was very happy to talk to you today.
Outro:
This was the first episode of season 12. Thank you very much for listening. Please join me in October again when my guest will be the Filipino-American journalist, Maria Ressa, who was the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She will share her experience with combating disinformation and overcoming restrictions on independence of media that are highly detrimental to democracy. She will explain how the very design of digital technology undermines our freedom. But also talk about how citizens can fight back against powerful corporations controlling these tools and platforms.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And let your friends know about the podcast, if you are enjoying it. We will continue to upload new episodes of Democracy in Question on the second Wednesday of each month. You can stay in touch with the work of my research group on soft authoritarianism and on pro-democracy youth activism at the University of Bremen, World of Contradictions, at: https://www.woc.uni-bremen.de/research-centers/ and at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy
[1] Digitally available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a81186-youth-activism-systemic-exclusion-real-participation-report
[2] On Gina Romeros activities for the World Movement for Democracy.see: https://www.movedemocracy.org/our-community-gina-romero
● [3] See: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-expert-statement-04oct24/ and also: UN Audiovisual Library of International Law — full lecture with transcript, October 2025
● Harvard Law School event page — "Protest and the Academy," March 2025
[4] See: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-expert-statement-04oct24/