CIAO DATE: 12/02

Threats to Democracy: Prevention and Response

Executive Summary

Threats to democracy—erosions of democracy and democratic institutions and unconstitutional interruptions to the democratic process—continue to plague countries on the path to democracy. Democratic governments, both individually and in their capacity as members of the Community of Democracies, regional and international organizations, and international financial institutions, must secure more effective international action against threats to democracy in states that have chosen the democratic path.

International involvement in situations where democracy is threatened has become increasingly common over the past decade, driven by the growing recognition that once the people of a state have chosen democracy as their preferred form of government, it becomes the right and duty of other democracies to help those people maintain their democracy when it is threatened from at home or abroad. Despite a number of successful cases, however, the efforts of the international community are poorly coordinated and often work at cross-purposes.

Aware of this, the Convening Group of the Community of Democracies held a ministerial panel at the first Community of Democracies meeting in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000, which called for a group of experts to analyze what could be done to protect democracies from ills such as coups, other unconstitutional interruptions of the democratic process, and erosions of democracy and democratic institutions.

With this in mind, the members of the Independent Task Force on Threats to Democracy undertook to create a conceptual framework for the coordination of international community action against such threats to democracy. The resulting Task Force report aims to facilitate a quick, unified response by democratic states. The report makes recommendations in four areas: preventive actions, responsive actions, actions for restoring democracy, and actions for securing individual responsibility for threats to democracy.

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