Representation

During the latter half of 2024, the primary trends in Representation were political upheaval and electoral reform in contexts like Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia, as well as restricted space for opposition political parties in Thailand and Pakistan. While public pressure and judicial intervention halted controversial electoral law changes in Indonesia that threatened opposition parties, the dissolution of the main opposition Move Forward Party in Thailand reflects a broader trend of lawfare being used to silence dissent. In Pakistan, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party continued to endure legal challenges brought on by the ruling coalition government.  

In Bangladesh, a student-led uprising abruptly ended Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule, paving the way for an interim government overseeing state institution reforms and organizing new elections. Nepal saw its fourth change in the ruling coalition since the 2022 general election, with the new alliance foreshadowing its plans to amend the constitution and electoral system.  

Yet even stable democracies faced turbulence in late 2024, with South Korea’s President briefly declaring martial law, which was swiftly overturned by parliament. 

Elections 

Four national elections took place in Asia and the Pacific in the second half of the election Supercycle year: three parliamentary (Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Japan) and one presidential (Sri Lanka). Voting age population turnout across the parliamentary elections averaged 62.8 per cent, down from an average of 63.9 per cent in the previous elections. Among those three elections, female representation increased from 16.9 to 21.1 per cent. Only in Sri Lanka did elections result in real incumbent turnover, where left-leaning candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake swept both presidential and snap parliamentary polls. Following political funding scandals, Japan’s snap parliamentary election delivered a rebuke to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which lost its majority but retained its position as the largest party in the House of Representatives. 

Rights

Most events in this six-month period concerned Rights. Restrictions on Civil Liberties were marked by the repression of protests in contexts like Pakistan and Bangladesh, which in the latter case led up to Hasina’s departure. In Malaysia and Pakistan, efforts to regulate online content are increasingly being used as tools to restrict Freedom of Expression and control an open Internet. In contrast, Bangladesh took a positive step by deciding to repeal the controversial Cybersecurity Act. 

The region also saw significant progress in accountability and reconciliation efforts; Nepal passed its long-awaited transitional justice law in August, while Thailand took the historic step to end statelessness and grant citizenship to nearly 500,000 people.  

Women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights saw a mix of progress and setbacks. Afghanistan continued its crackdown on women’s autonomy in the public and private sphere, while Vanuatu banned same-sex marriage and announced its plans to draft a national policy banning LGBTQIA+ advocacy as well. To the contrary, Indonesia narrowly expanded abortion rights, New Zealand passed a divorce law protecting domestic abuse victims, and parliamentary elections in Japan and Sri Lanka boosted women’s representation in the legislature.

Rule of law

Events coded as Rule of Law reflected both major political upheavals, primarily in South and Southeast Asia, and contestation over the authority of the judiciary. In Pakistan, the Supreme Court acted to ensure that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party could take its allotment of reserved parliamentary seats and thus deny the government a supermajority, and later reinstated highly contested anti-corruption laws. In response, the nation’s parliament moved to exert more direct control over the Court, passing legislation allowing it to choose the next Chief Justice. 

Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court was also active in ruling to compel the government to hold much-delayed local elections (despite the Court’s intervention, local elections remain indefinitely delayed as of December 2024). Elsewhere, popular mobilization was necessary to ensure the judiciary and the legislature adhered to the rule of law – in Indonesia, a significant bottom-up movement against changes to the electoral system seen as unduly benefitting the ruling coalition and the family of outgoing President Joko Widodo led the parliament to swiftly backtrack.   

Participation

As with the first half of the year, very few events were coded under Participation in the region. Those that were, however, reflected milestone events in the ability of mass civic participation to alter the course of national politics. In Bangladesh, the uprising which saw the end of Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen year rule spoke to the strength of local civil society and popular resilience despite years of democratic backsliding and police repression. As noted above under Rule of Law, Indonesia’s August nationwide protests showcased the ability of organized civil society and mass protests to prevent a government from straying too far outside of the agreed-upon limits to its discretion. Even in authoritarian Cambodia, simmering dissatisfaction on social media, dispersed local networks, and the Cambodian diaspora pressured the government into reversing an unpopular decades-old regional economic agreement. 

Representation

Attacks on opposition parties remained an important trend in the first half of 2025. In coup-affected Mali and Niger, the increasingly tenuous political transitions to civilian rule were set back further by the dissolution of all political parties. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the party of former President Jospeh Kabila was suspended for its ‘ambiguous’ view of the M23 rebel group, which the government is fighting in the east of the country. Electoral exclusion was another way in which political party freedom was undermined, with a leading opposition party and candidates ruled out of elections in Tanzania and Côte d'Ivoire, respectively. Elsewhere, opposition figures were physically attacked (Burundi and Republic of Congo) and detained and prosecuted (Chad, South Sudan and Tunisia). 

Yet, Effective Parliament has been an area of positive change in Lebanon and Liberia, where the election of a president and speaker, respectively, ended prolonged and damaging parliamentary deadlocks.  

Rights

Armed conflict and insecurity continued to negatively impact Rights performance. Wars in Palestine and Sudan and renewed fighting in the DRC deprived millions of access to basic necessities of life, the material foundation for democracy. Ethnic and sectarian violence in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, and Syria reflects how insecurity has undermined social cohesion, negatively impacting social group equality. 

Freedom of the press has been another casualty of the armed conflict in the DRC, with the authorities suspending  Al-Jazeera over an interview it conducted with the leader of the M23 and imposing a ban on media coverage of Joseph Kabila and his party.Media freedoms were also curtailed in Senegal, which in April suspended hundreds of outlets in a regulatory crackdown and in Ethiopia and Zambia, where government regulatory powers were significantly extended. 

There were positive developments too in access to justice, with Lebanon, Syria and Zimbabwe all taking steps to address historical injustices. 

Women’s political representation in Namibia improved dramatically in March, when Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, the country’s first woman president, appointed a gender-balanced cabinet and another woman, Lucia Witbooi, as her vice-president. Legal reforms in the Gulf brought advances and declines in gender equality, including the abolition of ‘honour killing’ leniency in Kuwait and new restrictions on the ability of Omani mothers to pass on citizenship to their children. 

Rule of Law

Ongoing tensions between the judicial and executive branches in Israel further undermined judicial independence in the country, as the Minister of Justice refused to acknowledge the authority of the newly appointed President of the Supreme Court and a new law expanded elected officials’ control over judicial appointments. Judicial independence also faced setbacks in Uganda, where a Supreme Court ruling declaring  military trials of civilians unconstitutional was first dismissed by President Yoweri Museveni and then contradicted by legislation reauthorising such trials.

Personal Integrity and Security was another area of negative change, with security agencies in several countries employing coercive tactics against members of key countervailing institutions, including the media (Burundi, Chad and Uganda), opposition parties (Burundi, Chad, Mali and Republic of the Congo) and the legal profession (Cameroon). People continued to be killed in large numbers in the region’s armed conflicts, notably the wars in Palestine and Sudan.

By contrast, there were positive developments in the fight against corruption in the DRC, Mauritius and Senegal, where prosecutions were initiated and (in the case of the DRC) concluded against former government officials. In Lebanon, banking secrecy rules were amended to facilitate investigations into corruption.         

Participation

There were four national elections in Africa and Western Asia between January and June 2025 –one presidential and three legislative, including inaugural, indirect Senate elections in Chad and Togo. The average voter turnout in the direct elections was 68.2 per cent. The 70.1 per cent voter turnout in Gabon’s presidential election, the first since the 2023 coup d’état, was the highest in three decades and marked a significant increase from the previous election (56.6 per cent). 

Beyond elections, there was notable civic engagement through protest in Mali and Zimbabwe, where citizens held historic demonstrations over democracy and governance concerns. Similarly, in Morocco, workers carried out the first general strike in a decade in response to a new law restricting the right to strike.

However, civil society organisations (CSOs) in several countries have faced new restrictions on civic space. In Zimbabwe, this came in the form of an intrusive new regulatory regime, while authorities in Jordan, Libya and Niger banned, suspended or expelled at least one CSO.