Note from authors : This op-ed was finalised as Zambia’s Parliament passed the Public Gatherings Bill 2026, legislation that will repeal and replace the colonial-era Public Order Act of 1955 once it receives presidential assent. The Bill raises concern over provisions that grant police discretionary authority to restrict gatherings of as few as three people in any publicly accessible space. Read alongside the cancellation of RightsCon, the timing is significant. The authors have reviewed the full text of the Bill and note that while it represents a partial modernisation of Zambia’s legal framework, the essential power relationship between the state and civic assembly remains largely intact.
Guest Op-Ed: Luckson Mulako Sikananu & Giovana Fleck
There is a particular kind of paradox that defines the current moment in global civil society: the conferences we convene to defend our rights are themselves becoming targets of the very forces we gather to resist.
A week before RightsCon was set to open, a government statement leaked to the press. ‘Postponed,’ it read, citing vague concerns about alignment on themes and attendees. Under no democratic principle should a government hold such power over a civil society conference. The alarm was immediate.
The frustration that followed was not only about this event. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society gatherings have become harder to access and increasingly precarious. RightsCon is valued at scale not only for the knowledge its community holds, but because for many it is a rare safe space. Access Now has invested significantly in making it so. When the government moved, they were placed in an impossible position, ultimately describing the cancellation as evidence of “the far reach of transnational repression targeting civil society, and effectively shrinking the spaces in which we operate.”
The damage extended further. UNESCO had co-located its World Press Freedom Day Global Conference in Lusaka for the same week; its programme was drastically reduced, and its flagship Guillermo Cano Prize ceremony moved to Paris. For those who had committed limited resources to attend, many already in transit, the loss is not only logistical. It is personal. These are our spaces, built painstakingly and defended constantly, taken from us by the very forces we had gathered to confront.
The Zambia that was promised
To understand the weight of what happened in Lusaka, it is necessary to understand what Zambia was supposed to represent.
In August 2021, Hakainde Hichilema defeated incumbent President Edgar Lungu of the Patriotic Front in one of the most significant democratic transitions in Zambia’s recent history, winning by nearly one million votes in his sixth attempt at the presidency. The scale of his victory, and the conditions that preceded it, mattered enormously. Lungu had overseen an escalation of authoritarian strategies including intimidation of political opponents, and subversion of key democratic institutions. Hichilema himself had been arrested on treason charges, denied permission to hold rallies, and barred from entering towns in his own country.
His election was received as a correction. In his inaugural speech, Hichilema promised to put human rights, rule of law, press freedom, and economic growth at the centre of his administration’s goals, calling on civil society institutions to actively engage with his government in working for change together.
Civil society organisations, local and international, took these commitments seriously. The optimism was not naive; it was grounded in the specificity of what had been promised and the credibility of the man who had suffered personally for those principles.
However, early optimism about Hichilema’s democratic commitment has since faded due to emerging authoritarian tendencies, raising concerns about the sustainability of democratic gains. The Cyber Security Act and the Cyber Crimes Act, enacted in April 2025, were cited by civil society organisations as falling short of international human rights standards and have been used to curtail online expression and arrest political opponents and ordinary citizens. The Law Association of Zambia has petitioned the High Court to declare provisions of the Cyber Crimes Act unconstitutional.
It is within this context that the Zambian government’s decision to halt RightsCon must be read. With the country having presidential elections this coming August, a gathering of this nature would have placed the government under sustained, and albeit international scrutiny at a moment when it could least afford it.
A Pattern written in plain sight
Our team was among those preparing to attend, with a workshop on content provenance and information integrity — bringing technical standards and practical examples but equally hoping to learn from participants navigating these threats in their own contexts. Like so many colleagues across the field, our work is oriented toward understanding digital authoritarianism and building the knowledge and tools that foster healthier information spaces. RightsCon was where that work was meant to happen.
The cancellation of the 2026 edition of RightsCon did not occur in isolation. It is one incident in a long and well-documented pattern of governments around the world effectively narrowing the conditions under which civil society can operate, and doing so with language carefully designed to appear reasonable.
Freedom House’s 2025 Freedom on the Net report recorded a fifteenth consecutive year of declining global internet freedom. CIVICUS now classifies civic space as “narrowed” not only in countries with authoritarian reputations. The geography of suppression has spread well beyond the contexts we might have once considered high-risk.
The methods, too, follow a recognisable pattern.
Within democracy, authoritarians use power to test the limits for autocratic ruling. Curtailing civil society, the freedom of assembly and the freedom of speech are severe signs that warn our communities. The cancelation of RightsCon can’t be taken lightly, and deserves wide documentation, scrutiny, and questioning.
The language of alignment
The official justification offered by Zambia’s Minister of Technology and Science deserves scrutiny.
The government stated that the postponement was required to ensure the conference’s “full alignment with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest consideration,” and that certain speakers remained subject to “pending administrative and security clearances.” These phrases carry the surface appearance of procedural responsibility. On examination, they assert something far more consequential: that a government has the right to pre-approve the content and participants of a civil society gathering before permitting it to proceed. This is tantamount to a gaggle on freedom of assembly.
This rhetorical pattern, bureaucratic in form and authoritarian in substance, is precisely what makes it effective; it offers no specific claim to disprove, and it creates a precedent that future governments, in Zambia, and elsewhere, can cite.
What followed added another layer of concern. Participants already accredited for World Press Freedom Day were suddenly asked to re-register on a new platform, a WordPress site managed by the Zambian government, with their personal information pre-loaded. UNESCO’s compliance with this demand offered little transparency to those affected. The questions it raises remain unanswered: what was done with participants’ data, why was the government requiring it, and did authorities retain the power to exclude individuals at will?
Interference beyond borders
The domestic explanation, while real, is incomplete. Access Now stated plainly that it believes foreign interference is the primary reason RightsCon 2026 will not proceed; pointing towards China.
The conference was scheduled to be held at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre, a facility constructed with a $30 million donation from the Chinese government. Zambia is a participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the power asymmetry embedded in that relationship creates conditions in which Beijing’s preferences do not need to be issued as directives to be understood rather as instructions. Reports suggest that the presence of Taiwanese delegates and sessions addressing Chinese surveillance technology exports were among the specific triggers.
Transnational civic space suppression operates by not require a formal directive, it functions through dependency, through the implicit understanding that certain conversations are unwelcome, and through the credible threat that hospitality to those conversations carries a cost.
What this means for the movement
Net Rights Coalition, a network of digital rights actors, described the episode not merely as the disruption of an event but as an attack on an already shrinking civic space. RightsCon is not just a conference; it is where the relational networks that sustain the digital rights movement are built and maintained, where cross-regional coalitions are formed, where strategy is developed in the kind of informal, trust-based exchanges that no online platform can fully replicate.
The Lusaka edition was also meant to be a correction. It would have been the first RightsCon in sub-Saharan Africa, chosen partly because Zambia’s visa-free access for 167 nationalities offered a rare opportunity to centre African voices without the exclusion that caused by failed visa policies in the 2023 Costa Rica edition. That correction has not happened. The communities most affected by digital repression are, again, the ones most displaced from the conversation about it.
The movement and sector at large now face a structural question it cannot defer: where can it convene? Western countries create physical access barriers. Countries in the Global South, where the need is most acute, carry political risk of this kind. There is no safe geography. There is only the difficult work of building enough political, legal, and diplomatic insulation around these events to make them harder to cancel, and enough distributed infrastructure to ensure that when they are cancelled, the work continues anyway.
The forces we are organised to resist are now organised enough to resist us in return. That is the challenge this moment presents, and it is one that requires not just solidarity, but strategy.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this guest essay are those of the author. RNW Media is not responsible for the opinions shared.