Civil Rights Defenders, CSO strategi CRD 2020-2025

Civil Rights Defenders (CRD) is an international, non-profit and independent human rights organisation that has worked for on defending people's civil and political rights for almost 40 years. CRD:s vision is a world of democratic societies in which we all enjoy our civil and political rights. CRD partner with and support human rights defenders who work in some of the world's most repressive regions across four continents by expanding the space for human rights defenders by improving security and capacity of partners and by increasing awareness and accountability in relation to civil and political rights. Trough advocacy, litigation, and public campaigns, CRD advance people's rights in the countries where respect for human rights is at its weakest. CRD submitted a proposal to Sida in June 2020 under the Strategy for Support via Swedish Civil Society organisations for the period October 2020 to December 2023. The overall objective of CRD's proposal is to Contribute to strengthened global, regional and national human rights movements through security, capacity, advocacy and awareness to alter oppressive power structures to ensure that authorities are held accountable in respecting democracy and human rights. The proposal includes eight programmes. The number of local partner organisations is approximately 95. The grand total budget for the three year period is 210 969 572 MSEK (including own contribution), of which 192 304 000 MSEK is applied from the CSO-Strategy. The proposed intervention logic builds upon the CRD Strategy 2020-2022 Theory of Change, focusing on the strength of human rights movements to alter oppressive power structures, and on the assumption that the four objective areas, security, capacity, advocacy and awareness, are key to achieve the envisioned change. Through CRD work on these objective areas together with partners, human rights actors will be enabled to work to fulfil the goal of a change from authoritarian and un-democratic societies - to ensure that authorities are held accountable in respecting democracy and human rights. The applied budget from the CSO-Strategy would mean an increase by roughly 50% of Sida-funds from 2020 to 2021. The reason for the increase is expansion of CRD's operations according their Strategy 2020-2022, strengthening of thematic areas and quality assurance. Several new recruitments are being planned, as well as developing core supports according to Sida guidelines. Sida assesses the proposal to be relevant to the CSO-Strategy. Sida considers it reasonable that CRD applies for a higher budget than what CRD has had in 2020 with reference to the proposed expansion, the efforts to mainstream key perspectives and the increased quality assurance through new recruitments. However, Sida considers that the administrative costs are too high in the budget proposal and that the expansion of the current operations is too fast. Therefore, Sida will grant less than what CRD has applied for. Sida further assesses that there are certain shortcomings with regard to CRD's perspective integration and its capacity to report results. Sida believes that it is of great importance that the CRD continues to prioritize development in these areas, even if the requested budget is not granted in its entirety. Sida proposes that the CRD is granted 158 000 000 SEK for the implementation of the intervention for the period of October 2020 to December 2023.