On 8 April, states on the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council elected 19 new members of the NGO Committee, the body that decides which civil society organisations receive the consultative status that gives them access to the UN system. The election was almost entirely uncontested, and 13 of the 19 elected states have closed or repressed civic space. The body that controls civil society’s access to the UN remains dominated by states determined to keep it out. Repressive states use tactics such as repeatedly demanding further information as a way of delaying decisions. Reform is long overdue.

In January, the government of Algeria succeeded in locking two civil society groups out of access to the United Nations (UN). It raised questions at the UN Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, known as the NGO Committee, about two civil society groups with accreditation. It alleged that Italian organisation Il Cenacolo was making politically motivated statements at the UN Human Rights Council and the Geneva-based International Committee for the Respect and Implementation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (CIRAC) was selling UN grounds passes. Four days later, it called a vote to revoke their status. Switzerland, a non-member of the Committee with no voting rights, pointed out that CIRAC was only given four days to respond to queries and called for a postponement of the vote so its response, received in French that morning, could be translated and shared. Costa Rica, Israel and the UK urged delay. But the no-action motion failed, and 11 of the body’s 19 members voted to recommend that the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) revoke Cenacolo’s accreditation and suspend CIRAC’s for a year.

The NGO Committee is the primary gatekeeper for civil society participation at the UN. It controls ECOSOC consultative status, which allows organisations to attend UN meetings, submit written statements, make oral interventions, organise side events and access UN premises. Its mandate, set out in ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31, is straightforward: to facilitate civil society access to the UN system.

Such access is particularly valuable for organisations working in repressive contexts, where domestic advocacy is suppressed. It can mean the difference between a community’s concerns being silenced or becoming a matter of international record. In practice, however, the Committee has so consistently worked to obstruct rather than enable access that it is widely known as the ‘anti-NGO Committee’.

Uncompetitive elections

On 8 April, in an almost entirely uncompetitive vote, ECOSOC members elected 19 states to serve on the NGO Committee for four-year terms. Only 20 candidates ran for the 19 seats. UN states are organised into five regional blocs, and four of them presented closed slates, putting forward only as many candidates as the number of seats available.

As a result, the Asia-Pacific group selected China, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all states with consistent track records of silencing civil society. Three – China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have closed civic space and are listed in the UN’s annual report for carrying out reprisals against civil society for engaging with the UN on human rights issues. In India, thousands of civil society groups have been stifled by increasingly restrictive rules on funding.

Latin America and the Caribbean is represented by Cuba, which systematically suppresses dissent and detains critics; Mexico, where journalists face levels of lethal violence unheard of in a country not at war; Nicaragua, which has decimated its civil society by shutting down thousands of organisations; and Peru, which last year passed a restrictive law against civil society organisations.

Four of the five African states elected — Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan and Tunisia — have repressed or closed civic space, with South Africa the only exception. Sudan is currently the scene of a devastating civil war where both sides are carrying out appalling atrocities, while Tunisia has increasingly become a dictatorship as a result of President Kais Saied’s power grab. The two states elected from the Western European and Other States group, Israel and Turkey, have also recently intensified their repression of civic space.

The one exception was the Eastern European group, where Estonia and Ukraine won seats in a three-way contest, keeping out authoritarian Belarus, which received only 23 votes against Estonia’s 44 and Ukraine’s 38. As in 2022, when Russia lost a similar race, the result showed that competitive elections open up scrutiny and produce better outcomes. The problem is they rarely happen.

Overall, 13 of 19 newly elected states are rated as having closed or repressed civic space by the CIVICUS Monitor, our research initiative that tracks the conditions for civil society around the world. Only one, Estonia, has open civic space. Fourteen of the 20 candidates had been named as carrying out reprisals against people engaging with the UN.

In the run-up to the election, the International Service for Human Rights published scorecards assessing all 20 candidates against eight criteria; 12 of the 20 met none. Over 80 civil society organisations called on ECOSOC member states to hold competitive elections and vote for candidates committed to civil society access. Forty independent UN human rights experts, including special rapporteurs on human rights defenders and on countries including Afghanistan, Iran and Russia, issued a statement warning that Committee members were abusing the accreditation process to block access for human rights organisations. All these warnings went unheeded.

Obstruction as standard

The withdrawal of CIRAC’s and Il Cenacolo’s accreditation, which awaits ECOSOC confirmation, was unprecedented, but it sits within a long pattern of obstruction. At the Committee’s latest regular session in January, 618 applications were under consideration, 381 of which had been deferred from previous sessions.

The backlog isn’t accidental. States ask repetitive questions about minor details and make short-notice requests for complex documentation to repeatedly delay applications until future sessions. States that repress civil society at home do the same in the international arena, targeting organisations that work on issues they deem controversial or opposed to their interests. Three states – China, India and Pakistan – stand out as worst abusers of this mechanism, having asked almost half of the 647 questions posed to applicants during the January session.

One striking example of how delay plays out is that of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, which faced persistent obstruction from India, resulting in its application being deferred for 15 years. It eventually gained consultative status in 2022, thanks to civil society advocacy that escalated the case to ECOSOC. While extreme, this case was far from unique. During the 2026 session, Transnational Anti-Organized Crime Intelligence Group Inc., a Philippines-based organisation that has been denied accreditation since January 2018, had its application deferred once again after the Philippines voiced last-minute allegations.

Repeated deferrals raise the costs for civil society organisations, draining financial resources and time. This is worsened by the fact that states refuse to allow online participation, despite the obvious burden in-person attendance in New York places on under-resourced organisations, particularly from the global south.

Civil society representatives attend the first meeting of the NGO Committee regular session in New York, USA, January 2019. Photo by UN Photo/Manuel Elías.

Voices from the frontline

Maithili Pai is Senior Programme Officer at the International Service for Human Rights, an organisation that supports civil society and human rights defenders at the UN.

 

The Committee must be reformed to restore its credibility and ensure it fulfils its mandate as a genuine facilitator of civil society access, rather than a blocker of it. Politicisation, excessive delays, lack of transparency and lack of accountability have impacted on the Committee, as pointed out by the UN Secretary-General, UN experts, several states and civil society organisations, to a point where it is failing to fulfil its core mandate. The Committee needs radical change. But any meaningful reform requires the agreement of sitting Committee members, and states with entrenched interests in preserving the status quo strongly oppose it.

At present, incremental reform is still possible, including through procedural steps. Applicants should be allowed to participate virtually, while the current system only permits in-person participation, which requires NGOs seeking consultative status to travel to New York. The current system, which relies on UN staff to relay hundreds of questions and responses back and forth between the Committee and hundreds of applicants each session, is extremely inefficient and resource intensive. The scope of questions must also be limited to the grounds listed under ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31 to prevent politically motivated questioning leading to prolonged deferrals of applications.

Strengthening the roles of ECOSOC and the Secretariat would also help reduce abuse of power. A stronger Secretariat role in assessing applications on objective, technical grounds would reduce political interference. ECOSOC, as the Committee’s parent body, could exercise stronger oversight to ensure it fulfils its mandate.

In the longer term, deeper reform might entail creating an independent expert body, transferring accreditation decisions fully to the Secretariat, or revising Committee membership criteria to remove states that do not qualify. I believe that the barriers impeding reform can be overcome by strong political will and leadership of states that recognise the value of civil society contributions at the UN.

 

This is an edited extract from our conversation with Maithili. Read the full interview here.

Time for reform

The UN’s current financial crisis is compounding the problem. The Chief of the NGO Branch — the unit in the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs that runs the Committee’s sessions — warned at the January meeting that it’s in danger of being unable to support the Committee in accordance with its mandate. The consequences of funding cuts were visible at the latest session, when the question-and-answer session was cancelled following an early adjournment. The loss of the only opportunity for organisations seeking accreditation to engage directly with the Committee fell hardest on smaller organisations that had travelled to New York to take part.

The UN’s current cost-cutting drive could at least be used as an opportunity to push for online participation and other efficiency reforms to reduce the bureaucratic burden of repeated requests for information. Beyond this, there’s a need to reassert that the Committee’s function is supposed to be that of an enabler rather than an obstructor.

The NGO Committee determines whether the voices of communities facing repression and violence can be heard in the UN system, and it’s been hijacked by states with every interest in ensuring they can’t. The Belarus result in this election and Russia’s ejection in 2022 show that competitive elections are essential if it’s to play its proper role. The floor can’t be left clear for states that repress civil society to act as gatekeepers. States that claim to support civil society must be willing to put themselves forward.

OUR CALLS FOR ACTION

  • The NGO Committee must be reformed to include online participation, transparent membership eligibility criteria and meaningful ECOSOC oversight.
  • All regional blocs must hold competitive elections for NGO Committee seats and enable civil society scrutiny throughout the process.
  • NGO Committee members must not use their position to block accreditation or revoke the status of accredited groups beyond the criteria set out in ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Cover photo by UN Photo/Manuel Elías