Priority areas

Women’s political participation

Although the LI Human Rights Committee events mostly took place online, it did not hinder the launch of the Women in Political Parties Index, the Women in Political Parties handbook and the Gender Equality Report. LI HRC organised events with regional organisations around the year, empowering women into politics. The regression of electoral rules concerning women in Somali legislation was highlighted in a statement to the UN Human Rights Council.

Digitalisation and human rights

A working group consisting of Rose Sakala, Nikolovna, Karen Melchior, Charlotte Burgess has been established to lead the work to develop the Liberal principles on Digitalisation and Human rights. A survey among member parties conducted earlier showed that a majority of member parties did not have a policy in these matters. Two policy labs were also held. During the year the planning also started concerning a campaign to support the launch of the principles.

Due to this work, LI was also connected with a range of new actors working in this field of human rights, such as Access Now and European Digital Rights.

LI HRC also joined Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s #FreedomFightsFake campaign and helped to stop the sale of Dot-Org, which was received positively.

Defending the democratic space

The year of democracy defenders was reflected through the active campaign of releasing Senator Leila de Lima in the Philippines, Ilham Tohti and defending the democratic activists in Europe’s last dictatorship, Belarus, and campaigned for a Cambodia without the oppression by the Hun Sen regime and for democracy in Nicaragua. LI HRC was active with the biggest delegation to the Geneva Summit for Human Rights.

COVID19

Liberals early on sounded the alarm bells and realised the dangers and temptation the pandemic meant for authoritarian regimes to introduce measures that curbed the freedom of citizens without any relevance to combatting the pandemic. We witnessed how “regular criminals" were realised from prison, but not any political prisoners; the first group due to the health risks COVID19 posed for the prisoners. Filipino Senator Leila de Lima was kept in custody without having access to her legal team, to name some examples. The freedom of association was also restricted for opposition parties but not for governing parties when elections came closer. The situation in many countries merited statements and warnings from our side.