Tech Global Institute joins the chorus of digital rights and human rights organizations worldwide condemning the cancellation of RightsCon 2026, which was set to make history as the first time the convening would be held in Southern Africa. Its cancellation, just days before opening and with some participants already in Lusaka, is a serious setback for the digital rights community and for the broader ambition of building genuinely inclusive global spaces.
According to the organizers, the underlying cause was pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Zambian government informally relayed conditions to Access Now to moderate specific topics and exclude Taiwanese participants from both the in-person and online event, which Access Now declined on the principled grounds that these conditions were incompatible with what RightsCon stands for. A conference years in the making, and weeks away from welcoming thousands of participants, was cancelled as a result.
Thousands of those participants bore real financial and professional costs. Smaller, under-resourced Global South organizations that committed scarce funds, secured visas, and took personal risks to attend deserve more than vague references to “national values.” We therefore call on the Government of Zambia to account publicly for its decision and explain why it walked away from its obligations to protect civic space and ensure that participants could engage freely, without intimidation, discrimination, or political interference.
It is also important that this failure does not become a reason to retreat from the goal of regional diversity in global convening. Governments in the Global South routinely operate under power asymmetries and neocolonial dependencies that constrain their political room to manoeuvre and make them more susceptible to external pressure. Breaking this pattern requires confronting those underlying conditions directly. We call on multilateral bodies and governments to treat this as a structural and to work toward the political and institutional frameworks that give host governments a genuine ability to stand by their commitments to human rights.
We also call on funders and other allies to help close the gap between the aspiration of inclusive global convenings and the practical conditions required to make them work. That means providing sustained financial support, building host-country safeguards into convening processes, and ensuring that participants have real recourse when commitments fall through.
Tech Global Institute has signed both the Net Rights Coalition statement and the Global South Alliance statement, and we stand in solidarity with all those who lost so much to this cancellation. We particularly stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Access Now, and civil society in Zambia and Taiwan, who have been disproportionately impacted by the cancellation.
