Repression and resilience: Diagnosing closing space mid-pandemic

28 REPRESSION AND RESILIENCE: DIAGNOSING CLOSING SPACE MID-PANDEMIC
number of attacks and other forms of harassment against
journalists. 101 102 620 press freedom violations linked
to COVID-19 have been reported so far, ranging from
arrests and unmotivated charges to violence, censorship,
and surveillance. 103 Moreover, 20% of respondents in an
ICFJ survey said their experience of online harassment
was “much worse” during the pandemic. 104
Judiciary
Previous research has shown that judicial independence
has been paramount to countering closing democratic
space worldwide in recent years, making it a target of
concerted efforts to weaken judicial integrity. 105 While
temporarily paralised by social distancing measures
and overburdened by case load, in some countries the
judiciary managed to uphold constitutionalism in the face
of attacks on democratic space during the pandemic. In
El Salvador for instance, the Constitutional Court of the
Supreme Court of Justice intervened in the executive’s
illegal detention of citizens in ‘containment centres’.
While the executive protested this decision, they ended
up complying unwillingly with the call to stop violating
fundamental rights. Similarly, Germany’s constitutional
court upheld the right to protest under the pandemic
as long as distancing measures were respected, 106 while
courts in the United States successfully adjudicated an
unprecedented number of fraud claims during the 2020
Presidential election. 107
On the contrary, in several countries with a politicised
or partial judiciary branch, judicial institutions have
struggled or failed to provide oversight and protect
fundamental rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In some cases, the pandemic was exploited to further
compromise the judiciary, as was the case in Hungary 108
and Argentina. 109 In other instances judicial institutions
were unable to oversee executive decisions due to the
sheer volume of decrees, forcing Courts to strategically
choose the most important decrees for constitutional
oversight. This had a big impact on civil society’s ability to
counter attacks on democratic space, as an independent
judiciary is in normal times a strong ally of civil society in
upholding fundamental freedoms. Yet at a time when all
oversight institutions were scrambling to adapt to a new
reality such alliances were rare.
Political parties
While smaller political parties and democratic coalitions
in parliaments were strong allies of civil society in
defending democratic space before the pandemic, many
of them were weakened by the crisis in their oversight
and opposition roles. As decision-making was centralised
in ruling parties through states of emergency, opposition
parties found themselves ineffective and fragmented
in their response. In countries where opposition parties
were already fragmented before the pandemic, this
defined their inability to counterbalance the government
during the pandemic. In some cases where the
opposition was relatively strong, as in Venezuela, they
also lost significant following and momentum due to the
101 UNESCO (2020): Journalism, press freedom and COVID-19. Available here.
102 UNESCO (2020): Reporting facts: Free from fear or favour. Available here.
103 International Press Institute: “IPI COVID-19 Press Freedom Tracker”. Dataset consulted on 9 April 2021. Available here.
104 Posetti, J. et al. (2020): Journalism and the Pandemic: A Global Snapshot of Impacts. Available here.
105 European Partnership for Democracy & Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (2020): Thinking democratically: a comprehensive
approach to countering and preventing ‘shrinking’ space. Available here.
106 CIVICUS (2020): Solidarity in the Times of COVID-19: Civil society responses to the pandemic. Available here.
107 International IDEA (2020): Taking Stock of Global Democratic Trends Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Available here.
108 Guasti, P. (2020): “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Central and Eastern Europe: The Rise of Autocracy and Democratic Resilience”.
Democratic Theory, 7(2): 47–60. DOI:10.3167/dt.2020.070207.
109 Alonso, L. (2020): “Argentina Under Covid-19: Extreme Lockdown, Rule by Decree and Judicial Politicization”. Available here.