What the RightsCon Cancellation Means for Digital Rights
May 6, 2026
This week was supposed to represent a brief flicker of optimism for the digital rights community. For the first time ever, RightsCon was to be held in Southern Africa. The annual conference, which draws thousands of civil society members to discuss how to protect and promote human rights through digital platforms, was scheduled for May 5–8. Activists, policymakers and researchers from across the world—including some involved in the Stern CBHR’s Working Group on Gaming and Regulation—had booked their tickets to Lusaka, Zambia.
But on April 28, the Zambian government abruptly announced that the conference had been “postponed,” claiming that the country needed more time to ensure that the conference “fully [aligns] with national procedures, diplomatic protocols, and the broader objective of fostering a balanced and consensus-driven platform for dialogue.” On April 30, RightsCon announced the conference would not proceed, before following up with a statement on May 1 citing “foreign interference” as the reason.
“[We were told that] in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation,” the statement read. “This was our red line…. We see this unilateral decision, and the way it was taken, as evidence of the far reach of transnational repression targeting civil society, and effectively shrinking the spaces in which we operate.”
China has invested significant financial resources in Zambia, including helping to finance the Mulungushi International Conference Center, where this year’s RightsCon was supposed to take place. Two other pieces of circumstantial evidence point to China’s role: last year’s RightsCon was held in Taiwan, and three days before the postponement announcement, China announced it was providing Zambia a development cooperation grant worth $14.6 million USD.
Zambia, for its part, enacted two laws last year—the Cyber Security Act and Cyber Crimes Act—which critics argue are broadly worded and could be easily weaponized against online critics of the government. In an April 2025 statement, the Law Association of Zambia opposed both, claiming they “infringe upon the rights and freedoms of citizens, hinder the free press, and have the potential to undermine the cherished democracy in our country, Zambia.”
The cancellation of RightsCon isn’t just about Chinese influence in sub-Saharan Africa, but another example of the global backsliding of digital rights worldwide. This includes in the US, where some institutions and companies that once pushed back against authoritarian tech governance are retreating from that fight. The Trump administration has shuttered the State Department’s Global Engagement Center—an important tool for countering foreign disinformation—and cut funding for programs supporting digital activism in autocratic regimes, including eliminating the US Agency for International Development, one of the world’s largest funders of digital rights work.
In response to the administration’s policy preferences, companies like Meta and X have rolled back their commitments to information integrity and safety, even at the risk of vulnerable communities in the Global South. This is now exemplified in the case of RightsCon, where the Zambian activists who helped organize and promote the event now find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.
This retreat has widened the window for China to export its technology as well as its governing assumptions about how that technology should be used—now with limited pushback from either US companies or the government. According to the Institute of Development Studies, for instance, Ghana, Morocco and Zambia have all spent over $250 million on Chinese mass surveillance technology, which allows local governments to track digital dissidents via mobile spyware, internet interception and social media monitoring.
These arrangements do not produce overnight deference to Beijing’s every position. But they do create the conditions under which China can find leverage when one of its “core interests,” like the status of Taiwan, is at stake. The RightsCon cancellation shows what that leverage can look like in practice.
It’s unclear what will happen to RightsCon 2026, or if it will even proceed at all. But the harder question the cancellation points to is how to build a global movement around digital rights when the infrastructure underpinning that digital access is increasingly controlled by either companies and governments with no interest in this conversation. This is particularly true for many locations in the Global South where (as demonstrated in Zambia) investments by governments that do not respect free speech can easily outpace digital rights-centric alternatives.
There are institutions that can help meet this moment. The Freedom Online Coalition, for instance, which consists of 41 states explicitly committed to supporting global digital rights, released a statement criticizing the cancellation.
“This event in Lusaka carried immense promise: an opportunity to center African perspective and priorities… and to amplify the voices of local activists, researchers, and advocates who seldom have the chance to engage with international counterparts on home ground,” the statement said. “That opportunity has now been lost.”
But on-paper commitments and strongly-worded statements, while important, don’t amount to concrete action. FOC member states, and the supporters of other multilateral institutions that claim to be committed to internet freedom, need to find their political will to offer tangible, material support to RightsCon and other civil society groups dedicated to protecting and promoting digital human rights—even at the expense of creating powerful adversaries.
This could start with a member state offering support for an alternative venue for this year’s conference, preferably one that is accessible (both financially and logistically) for activists and stakeholders from the Global South, who have limited resources to attend conferences in—for example—Geneva or New York City. These states should also make an effort to be present at the conferences themselves to help ensure the suggestions made by civil society can actually translate into governmental policy.
Without this sort of support, these spaces will continue to close off, one cancelled conference at a time.
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