Holding the Line: Human Rights in an Age of Rising Authoritarianism

Release date November 9. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Key Takeaways

• With civic space shrinking across Kenya and East Africa, human rights defenders are focused on "holding the line." Their priority is protecting hard-won legal gains on reproductive health, HIV, and bodily autonomy from being watered down.

• The rule of law is weakening in practical ways. Court orders go unenforced, judiciaries are underfunded, and parliaments that are supposed to provide oversight increasingly act as an extension of the executive.

• When resources shrink, the poorest and most marginalized people lose their rights first. Funding for legal reform, anti-stigma work, and fighting misinformation is often the first thing to be cut, because it gets treated as "nice to have."

• Climate shocks never arrive as a single crisis. For women and girls, a drought or flood can quickly become a health, education, safety, and livelihood crisis all at once. Maleche says this is why donors need flexible, long-term funding that protects core health and rights services.

• Young people across Africa are combining litigation, digital storytelling, community organizing, and political pressure to hold both governments and corporations accountable. They are also making intergenerational justice a legal question.

Holding the Line

Asked how he is navigating this moment as a human rights defender, Maleche didn't sugarcoat it. Civil society is facing a shrinking space in Kenya and globally. Political parties are prioritizing trade and business over human rights. Religious fundamentalist groups are pushing back on progress around reproductive rights, the rights of people living with HIV, and sexual identity.

In response, Maleche says, the strategy has become defensive by necessity. The aim is to protect what has already been won by relying on the legal frameworks Kenya adopted years ago, so that people can still find redress when their rights are violated.

That work is at the core of KELIN, the Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS. KELIN uses the law to advance the right to health in three ways: working alongside community groups, pressing lawmakers and the executive to implement health-protective policies, and taking cases to Kenya's High Court and regional courts. Maleche stresses that health can't be separated from privacy, dignity, and the right to a clean and healthy environment. "You cannot just enjoy the rights to health alone," he said.

When the Rule of Law Weakens

Dr. Ngô set the global context. By the figures he cited, more than three billion people now live in countries becoming more authoritarian, and the number of armed conflicts worldwide has more than doubled in fifteen years. In Kenya, young people demanding change have faced arrest, violence, and disappearance.

Maleche described how this pressure plays out on the ground. Some governments in the region are cutting judicial budgets, making it harder for courts to operate independently. When parliament and the executive stop functioning as separate branches, he said, citizens lose a watchdog. Even when courageous judges rule against governments or corporations, enforcement often lags. As one example, he pointed to Kenyan court orders barring police from using excessive force against protesters, orders he says have not been respected.

He also raised concerns about well-funded groups with easy access to political leaders, including through prayer breakfasts. These groups are pushing for more restrictive laws on reproductive health and spreading misinformation about vaccines. Maleche added that some regional "family values" initiatives are being backed by entities that aren't even African.

Who Loses Rights First

Dr. Ngô noted that rights cost money to become realized. They depend on health workers, clinics, courts, and community organizations, at a time when Kenya is squeezed by public debt, inequality, climate shocks, and major cuts to foreign assistance. He also pointed out that before the 2025 U.S. foreign assistance cuts, approximately 41,000 doctors, nurses, administrative staff, and community health workers in Kenya were supported by U.S. funding. He added that Columbia's own research found HIV prevention and community-led services were disrupted from the earliest days of the terminations.

Maleche's answer about who suffers first was immediate. "It is a poor woman in a rural village in Kenya who will be unable to walk to her clinic because the government may not have purchased sufficient medicine," he said. It is the woman who arrives at a health facility in labor and finds no staff, because health workers haven't been paid or the equipment isn't there.

He also warned about a quieter shift. When funding shrinks, donors tend to narrow their focus to biomedical services, putting pills in people's hands. Maleche agrees that life-saving medicine matters. But without investment in repealing harmful laws, reducing stigma, and countering misinformation, he argued, the services themselves won't work. He used the response to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an example. "When funding dwindles, those are things that are then seen to be nice to have and not necessary to have," he said.

How Communities Are Adapting

Communities aren't waiting for outside help to return. Maleche described people pooling money, sharing food during droughts, and contributing to collective funds to support families displaced by flooding, sometimes working alongside groups like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

KELIN continues to use existing laws to challenge government agreements and the actions of state and non-state actors that threaten established rights. Maleche says the shift begins when people understand that "an injustice is not just simply a personal misfortune," but a public duty someone has failed to fulfill.

Young Kenyans, meanwhile, are organizing differently. They use TikTok, Instagram, art, and storytelling to document mining done without community consultation, tax increases, and abuse in health facilities. Maleche also sees organizations working on the environment, health, land, gender, and disability realizing that their struggles are connected. They are forming alliances that combine legal advocacy, research, and public mobilization.

Climate Change as a Rights Crisis

Dr. Ngô and Maleche have written together about why climate justice and reproductive justice can't be separated. In this conversation, Maleche explained what that looks like for women and girls in Kenya.

"When climate shock occurs, it's not one isolated event," he said. "A drought can quickly become a food, health, education, displacement and protection crisis." When water becomes scarce, women travel farther to find it, which increases both their unpaid care work and their exposure to violence. When food runs short, women may eat last or least. When families lose income, girls may be pulled out of school, raising the risk of child marriage, sexual exploitation, and unintended pregnancy. Flooded roads cut off health facilities, yet pregnancy, menstruation, sexual violence, and the need for contraception don't pause during a disaster.

Dr. Ngô shared a parallel from his own research on child marriage. Studies have documented spikes in child marriage after floods and droughts in West Africa and Bangladesh, as marriage becomes a survival strategy for struggling families.

Maleche's recommendations for donors and governments were concrete:

• Provide flexible, long-term funding that can adapt when a crisis hits

• Protect sexual and reproductive health care, gender-based violence services, and continuity of treatment during emergencies

• Fund local organizations, which are the first responders

• Invest in prevention, legal empowerment, and accountability so governments are better prepared next time

"Climate change does not arrive as a single crisis," he said. "It enters through every existing inequality."

A New Generation of Activism

Dr. Ngô pointed to a wave of youth-led action across the continent. Young South Africans won a High Court case against plans for new coal power. Indigenous communities, women's groups, and young people in Kenya are organizing around land and food systems. African youth are taking climate justice to the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights.

Maleche agreed that this is a new model. In South Africa's youth-led #CancelCoal case, he noted, the court found that the government had not adequately considered the health effects on children and the environment. Closer to home, in the Kakamega region where Maleche grew up, young people are questioning how a gold mining company obtained consent. Groups of young women are documenting the health effects of mercury used in illegal mining, partnering with journalists to bring that evidence to a wider audience.

He sees four shifts in how young people are organizing:

• They present themselves "as rights holders and not simply as future victims."

• They pair court action with community mobilization, scientific evidence, digital advocacy, storytelling, and political pressure.

• They hold governments and corporations to the same standard.

• They are making intergenerational justice a legal question.

"You cannot make decisions today, transfer consequences to a generation, and then deny us a voice in challenging [them]," Maleche said, describing what he hears from young people.

KELIN's role, he said, is not to lead this movement but to enable it: to make legal tools accessible, help translate lived experience into enforceable claims, and keep remedies grounded in what communities actually need.

Why He's Still in the Game

To close, Dr. Ngô asked what decades of challenging power have taught Maleche about when change becomes possible. "Institutions can change, but only when people remain organized, persistent, and are unwilling to accept injustice as normal," he said.

The lessons he shared were hard-won:

• Change is rarely immediate or linear. A case lost in court can still shift public opinion and lay the groundwork for the next one.

• The people closest to an injustice often understand both the problem and the solution best. The advocate's job is to make institutions listen, not to speak over communities.

• The law alone is never enough. "A judgment can open a door," he said, but communities, advocates, journalists, and public officials still have to push change through it.

• Institutions rarely give up power because of a persuasive argument. Progress takes persistence, sometimes returning to the same institution with the same demand for years.

And why does he keep going? Because, he said, when future generations ask what he was doing while their rights were being violated, he wants to be able to answer: "I was holding the line."

PopTalks is a podcast from Dr. Thoại Ngô and Columbia's Department of Population and Family Health. New episodes release every two weeks.

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