Democracy ♦ Article 65 Va. J. Int’l L. 57 (2024)

The Regulation of Foreign Funding of Nonprofits in a Democracy

NICK ROBINSON

Governments around the world have increasingly regulated nonprofits’ access to foreign funding. These regulations, which often take the form of registration requirements, are justified as needed to protect a country’s politics from undue foreign influence. Yet, they have also placed new burdens on nonprofits and been used by governments to discredit critics, creating significant new constraints on activism on issues from fighting climate change to protecting human rights. While authoritarian governments have been the most aggressive proponents of these restrictions, many democracies have also embraced variants of them, creating new uncertainty about how foreign funding of nonprofits should be regulated.