Empowering civil society organisations and activists championing human rights and democratic values in the EU

ongoing

"The project aims to enhance the protection of the civic space in selected EU countries in Southern Europe by empowering civil society actors to report threats and violations of their fundamental rights. In the context of the ""shrinking civic space"" phenomenon, this project has the goal to develop monitoring and early warning mechanism, capacity building and promoting public trust in civil society actors through a combination of evidence-based and communication actions. The CivicChampions project addresses the objectives listed under Topic 2 of the call, namely promoting human rights and democratic values through empowering the civic space in the EU. This will be achieved by: ● Analytical activities and creation of a methodology and tool to monitor the threats and attacks on civic space actors in pre-selected EU Member States; ● Mutual learning, exchange of good practices, including those that may be transferable to other countries; ● Communication activities, including dissemination of information and awareness raising about the state of play on civic space, including towards project countries and the EU level; ● Capacity building in civil society organisations on monitoring the civic space and reporting alerts; ● Developments of tools and services for the support and the protection of CSOs, their members and other rights defenders working to protect and promote EU values, under attack. The project addresses three main target groups: 1) CSOs and activists (incl. non-governmental organisations, human rights activists, and other civic actors working closely in the area of human rights and EU values), operating in the project countries – Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and Italy; 2) policy-makers (e.g. representatives of governmental sector) and the 3) general public which will be affected mostly by the activities aimed at building institutional and public trust in civil society."