21 July 2025
Today we welcomed the launch of a new initiative to uphold those rights, the Civil Society Covenant.
The Baring Foundation has a long history of advocating for the rights and independence of civil society, most recently through supporting the work of Civil Exchange and BOND in this endeavour and, prior to that, many years supporting the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector.
David Cutler says:
“The Covenant comes from the very top of Government, which is essential. It is based on principles which the Baring Foundation can certainly support, most importantly to ‘respect the independence of civil society organisations and ensure they can advocate for those they serve and hold government to account without fear of reprisal’. Even more critical is the mechanism for breathing life into the Covenant. We need a hard-working Joint Council that is taken seriously […]
In a number of ways the Covenant does not go far enough. There is nothing on the entirely wrongheaded ‘gagging clauses’ brought in by a previous Government that should already have been scrapped. These and no advocacy provisions are entirely in contradiction to the Covenant. The Lobbying Act remains problematic. And beyond this, the Foundation had hoped for some signs of the Government’s intention to repeal excessive legislative clamp-downs on peaceful protest by previous Governments […]
Along with these highly important areas that still need to be addressed, civil society as a whole needs to commit to using the Covenant and holding the Government to account through an energetic use of these processes.”
The Foundation’s full response can be found in a new blog , which asks how we – civil society – can now go further, as well as remembering and paying tribute to the authors of the Covenant’s predecessor, the Compact.