Access to funding for the protection and promotion of human rights for civil society organizations from public or private sources is an integral part of the right to freedom of association and is crucial for the exercise of the rights and work of human rights defenders. This thematic report is part of the ongoing work of the Human Rights House Zagreb (HRH) to monitor the exercise and promotion of the rights of human rights defenders in Croatia.
In the past few years, the HRH has produced two reports on the challenges and issues faced by human rights defenders in Croatia: Human Rights Defenders in Croatia: Obstacles and Challenges in 2018 and Human Rights Defenders: Challenges and Barriers in 2022, which provide a comprehensive overview of the most significant issues through a periodic review of the situation. Although problems related to access to funding appear in these reports, precisely because of the importance of access to quality, continuous and transparent forms of funding, in 2021 the HRC developed Access to Funding for Civil Society Organizations in Croatia: Union Programs, ESI Funds and the State Budget, which describes and identifies in more detail the problems that civil society organizations have in accessing funding.
Building on previous research work and analyses of other relevant stakeholders, the HRC research team identified four groups of problems and challenges: 1) access to funding for advocacy and research activities and activities that enable work on public policies, 2) access to funding from national and local public sources, 3) access to funding that can encompass work on current topics in the field of human rights, and 4) administrative burden and administrative obstacles to access to funding. Within these thematic blocks is structured this thematic report, which was created on the basis of conducted qualitative action research – using a semi-structured interview method with 10 civil society organizations that are active in the field of human rights, suppression of discrimination, rights of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, women’s human rights, provision of free legal aid, human rights of LGBTIQ persons, transitional justice, environmental protection, democratization, transparency and fight against corruption, rights of persons with disabilities and socially and economically vulnerable social groups.
