Civicus

Construction workers strike after months of unsuccessful pay talks On 6th November 2025, workers at C.O. Williams Construction Co. Ltd. withdrew their labour after several months of negotiations over salary and wage increases failed to produce an agreement. The action initially affected employees at the company’s Lears site in St Michael, one of Barbados’s 11 parishes, while the BWU said workers from C.O. Williams sites more broadly had joined the strike.

Civic space in Bhutan is rated as ‘obstructed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor. There continue to be concerns about media independence, access to information and the chilling effect of defamation laws on journalists and critics. Further, there are political prisoners from the 1990s convicted under the draconian and vaguely-worded 1992 National Security Act (NSA), who are serving life sentences.

Statement at the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council Item 2: Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on Afghanistan with the Special Rapporteur Delivered by Wazhma Tokhi Mr. Vice-President, CIVICUS and Pohana Foundation welcome the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, highlighting the serious violations in the country over the last 5 years by the Taliban.

New York City, 8 September 2026 The race for United Nations (UN) Secretary-General enters a decisive phase, with eight candidates competing for the top job. Civil society continues to face barriers to meaningful participation and access at the UN. World leaders gather in New York as the UN faces mounting pressure to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and respond to global crises.

By Mandeep Tiwana, CIVICUS Secretary General and Susan Marx, Chiefs Programmes Officer Across authoritarian regimes and even democracies, state apparatuses frequently achieve the same outcome through formal legal machinery: weaponizing extraordinary counterterror statutes in the name of national security, imposing endless pre-trial detention, and relying on procedural delays to remove dissenting voices from the public sphere.

By Jesselina Rana, UN Advisor The annual High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) brings together government officials, civil society, and UN agencies to assess progress on the SDGs. It is intended to go beyond reporting to identify what is working, what is failing, and what needs to change.

CIVICUS discusses renewed conflict and a growing crackdown on independent media in Ethiopia with Yonas Kedir, Editor-in-Chief of the independent news outlet Addis Standard, who was recently abducted and detained by government forces. Fighting has resumed in western Tigray, straining the 2022 peace agreement that ended a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

As the United Nations (UN) marks its 81st year, civil society continues to face significant barriers to meaningful participation. During UN General Assembly (UNGA) High-Level Week, these barriers remain visible, from the suspension of badges for ECOSOC-accredited non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to the absence of a permanent platform for civil society engagement, as well as reprisals by States against those who engage with UN processes.

Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have embraced drone warfare, causing civilian deaths, with hospitals, marketplaces and schools among the targets. Fierce fighting around the city of El Obeid brings fear of another massacre, as happened when militia forces captured El Fasher last October. Civil society is trying to respond to the humanitarian emergency but faces restrictions.

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