Next week is the 2nd Summit for Democracy (S4D) hosted by the United States government and the governments of Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Zambia. On 28 March, an online event will be followed by regional, in-person meetings with civil society and stakeholders on 29 March in each host country. For more information, please see the overview of events.
The UNCAC Coalition and many members have actively engaged in the Summit for Democracy Year of Action. One way to participate was through the Democracy Cohorts – multi-stakeholder groups of governments, civil society, and the private sector focused on specific themes. Below is a summary of how the Coalition and its members have contributed and how civil society organizations can get involved.
Democracy Day webinar
The UNCAC Coalition is co-organizing a webinar on Monday, 27 March called Tackling corruption in shrinking civic space in collaboration with the Asia Foundation and Transparency International. The Global Democracy Coalition coordinates a full events program for Partners for Democracy Day as a platform for including voices that may not be part of the official Summit. Here is the link to join the Zoom webinar.
Civil society declaration
The civil society co-leads of the 14 Democracy Cohorts have developed a civil society declaration, ‘Civil Society Declaration of Principles’, to be presented at the Summit. The declaration highlights key themes and includes a section on anti-corruption, calling for strengthening the UNCAC, the Open Government Partnership, and the Financial Action Task Force, as well as recommendations for increased civic space. Interested organizations can sign on until 31 March 2023. Please see the organizer’s guidance for more information about the declaration and instructions about how to sign on.
Calls to action from the International Cooperation for Anti-Corruption Cohort
The International Cooperation for Anti-Corruption Cohort, with input from the UNCAC Coalition, developed a set of concrete calls to action for governments to tackle corruption globally. These include strengthening the UNCAC's Implementation Review Mechanism and strengthening international cooperation to tackle high-level corruption and asset recovery cases. The cohort is co-led by the government of Moldova, the Basel Institute on Governance, and Transparency International. We hope that these recommendations will also be taken into account by governments as they develop resolutions for the UNCAC CoSP10.
Calls to action from the Civic Space Cohort
The UNCAC Coalition has contributed to the work of the Civic Space Cohort, co-led by the governments of Norway and the Czech Republic and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), participating in the cohort’s ‘Civic Space at the UN’ workstream about defending and widening civic space at the UN level. This is an important issue for the Coalition due to the challenges civil society organizations face to participate in UNCAC fora fully. Recent years have seen a growing number of leading NGOs being excluded from the UNCAC’s Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) due to politically motivated objections from some Member States.
We are sharing the consensus documents from the civic space cohort that will be presented at the Summit, which include calls to action for governments to defend and improve civil society inclusion across the UN system and to protect and strengthen civic space more broadly. The UNCAC Coalition plans to build on these recommendations and encourage governments to support and promote the active and meaningful participation of civil society. With thanks to the cohort for allowing us to share these documents, all six calls to action from the six workstreams can be viewed through accessing the links below:
