Jordan’s enabling environment for civil society continued to narrow between July 2025 and March 2026, with conditions remaining constrained or slightly worsening across principles.
During this period, pressure on fundamental civic freedoms remained constant, with continued persecution of individuals for political expression and restrictions on public protests since March 2025, especially in the broader regional context of the late February 2026 outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran. Authorities continued to apply the 2023 cybercrime law to suppress critical online expression. The digital environment also saw new evidence of the security apparatus’s capacity to access data from detained individuals’ devices (including those of civic actors) using Cellebrite tools, in addition to a proposal for a licensing regime for digital content creators. At the same time, no changes to the legal framework governing civil society were brought into effect during this reporting period.
Across other principles, several broader trends remained largely unchanged. Donor funding continued to decline, public discourse continued to acknowledge the role of civil society in formal terms while often framing it within broader national unity narratives, and state engagement with civil society remained present but limited in depth and impact.
