Responding to the call for inputs on protection of human rights defenders in the digital age, Eurasian Coalition on Health, Rights, Gender, and Sexual Diversity (ECOM) has submitted an input stressing:
- LGBT human rights defenders (HRDs) face an acute convergence of threats: Russian-model repressive legislation, state-sponsored digital surveillance, online entrapment, coordinated harassment, and transnational repression targeting exiled activists.
- Civic space across EECA as narrowed, obstructed, repressive, or closed in every country of focus not one offers a fully open environment. The situation has deteriorated sharply in 2024–2025, with cascading legislative attacks directly targeting LGBT defenders and the digital spaces in which they organize. The report on shrinking civic space in the EECA confirms self-censorship by civil society organizations with organizations closing social media channels, removing website content, modifying public communications, and shifting entirely to closed or offline formats in response to surveillance risks and propaganda law exposure.
- This has a direct epistemic consequence: the evidence base on which OHCHR, UN Treaty Bodies, and international advocacy rely is being systematically degraded. Organizations cannot safely document violations if documentation itself is a liability. Victims cannot report to monitoring systems if those systems are surveilled. Organizational shutdowns and increasing surveillance mean that the actual scale of violations is substantially greater than any monitoring system can capture.
ECOM input has been considered in the Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights “Protecting human rights defenders in the digital age”. At least 3 points (26, 28, 57) point out the cumulative harms induced by targeted surveillance, an interconnected surveillance ecosystem and digital attacks on human rights defenders and other civil society actors. One of the recommendations (in part b) indicates that periodic reviews of digital governance frameworks to assess their impacts on human rights defenders and their broader implications for civic space and for the rights to privacy, expression, association and non discrimination online, involving defenders and concerned communities are needed. The recommendations, among others, call States to protect the civic space online, prevent criminalization of human rights work, systematically involve HRDs, civil society and affected communities in developing and reviewing digital governance frameworks and assessing their impact on civic space and fundamental rights.