Funding of Artistic Freedom

Your report highlights the fragility of funding for artistic freedom initiatives. What strategies can donors and civil society organisations adopt to ensure long-term, sustainable support for these critical areas?

The few donors in Europe who support artistic freedom projects are government funded through development organisations or arts councils. When governments change, they also have a tendency to change focus, so civil society organisations that have established good relationships with those administering funding cannot be guaranteed long-term sustainability. Unless artistic freedom becomes a higher priority with donors – in the way that media freedom is – it won’t be easy to ensure a sustainable and efficient work environment.

You mention that short-term funding cycles can undermine the effectiveness of artistic freedom projects. Could you elaborate on how this affects the work of civil society organisations and the artists they support?

Short term funding may address a specific topic or region and for CSOs such funding while welcome can be extremely challenging. CSOs risk jumping from one focus to another to secure financial support, but unless the short-term funding is allocated to a specific event such as a world conference, it leaves the organisations with no sustainability staff wise or are unable to continue essential programs when the short-term funding is terminated. As an example – If an organisation is given support for one year to focus specifically on a particular European region or topic, providing support to other organisations, artists or cultural institutions, its capacity to continue such support could disappear if the organisation cannot continue to pay their staff. So, people and their expertise which was put to work worked intensively on such a project disappear. All organisations wish to keep a sustainable institutional memory and capacity. However, this is not possible with short term funding

Given the challenges in securing funding for artistic freedom, what role do alternative funding models, such as crowdfunding or private sector partnerships, play in sustaining these initiatives?

The financial fragility of existing artistic freedom organisations leaves very little space for such activities. Major human rights organisations have used so-called “facers” to recruit new paying members. In principle a “facer” must recruit a new paying member each hour to cover the salary. This is not a valid model for smaller CSO’s – and in my view many people also react negatively passing by “facers.” Crowdfunding may be useful for a particular campaign but not for regular, essential core work such as documentation and monitoring. In a very few countries a CSO may be hosted by a private organisation or even a city council and thus get access to free office space, but we still need to see this happening in major cities in Europe.

How can funders measure the impact of their support for artistic freedom without imposing restrictive conditions that might compromise the independence of artists and organisations?

Provided the donors and receiving organisations respect and understand their respective roles and value systems, I don’t see a problem. Problems occur if a donor wishes to impose value systems which do not respect fundamental rights or if they wish to avoid controversial issues during the time of the grant period.
Donors – especially government based – spend quite a bit of money on evaluations made by external experts. In my experience over the past 25 years even well documented effects measured by evaluators do not necessarily lead to continued or increased funding as the donors – including private donors – may change the focus of their funding policies.

Measuring impact is not easy. You may measure an immediate effect for example when organisations succeed in getting an artist released. However, creating awareness, changing policies and legislations takes time. Timing and the current political climate are crucial. When Freemuse organised the first ever world conference on artistic freedom in 2012 the timing and climate was right. The UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights invited Freemuse to provide a report, which then qualified the rapporteur to develop the first ever UN report on artistic freedom. UNESCO similarly requested Freemuse to provide input to develop a monitoring framework on artistic freedom for the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Diversities as well as developing a training manual for experts. So, within a year many donors and organisations started referring to these two initiatives. In short – the political and public awareness increased immensely within a few years. This was easy to measure. But creating awareness and breaking new barriers is something that needs to be done constantly. When looked at from a long-term perspective, donors have been able to measure increased impact through scholarly research, greater public and political awareness, improvement in legislations, increased media coverage, greater openness to create residencies for artists at risk etc.

Your report mentions differences in funding availability across regions. What measures could be taken to ensure equitable access to funding for artistic freedom in less-resourced countries or communities?

Ironically, it is not necessarily easier for CSOs established in the richer countries to get access to funding than it is for CSOs and communities in less resourced countries and to a certain extent sometimes it is easier for an organisation based in a less-resourced country. As an example, the European Cultural Foundation has focussed a lot on Eastern Europe, as have several US based organisations. So, some of my colleagues in these countries can access a much broader portfolio of potential donors than organisations based in the Nordic Countries. When the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) decided to transfer their artistic freedom portfolio to the Swedish Arts Council, then the money that used to be allocated to a few western based artistic freedom organisations was split up into a dozen smaller portions to organisations all over the world. This enhanced national and regional monitoring and documentation in some areas but risked the sustainability of those organisations who previously had documented and monitored global tendencies. This might seem like a good idea, but there was no analysis of how this change affected the global monitoring.

In your view, how important is public funding versus private or international funding for safeguarding artistic freedom, and how should the balance be approached?

Unfortunately, public funding is and has been extremely important as private donors as well as international funders in general do not prioritise the core work of documenting and monitoring artistic freedom. We have also noticed that some major public funders spent large amounts of money on “basket funding” through other organisations working with culture. But these big pools of money do not prioritise artistic freedom. So, you might argue that “money is not the problem” – the problem is the priorities of the major donors.

European Union Support for Artistic Freedom

In your study, you suggest that the European Union should more actively monitor violations of artistic freedom. What specific actions or mechanisms would you recommend to enhance the EU’s action in this regard?

The EU has over the years developed several policy papers that mention artistic freedom. Our report focussed on the previous periods of the EU Commission. The new Commission may put more focus on implementing these policy papers.

So far, we’ve seen the EU Commissioner for culture, Glenn Micallef, speaking very strongly about the importance of promoting and defending artistic freedom. Hopefully, he will be able to establish financial support to civil society organisations documenting and monitoring violations on artistic freedom in Europe and engage other areas of the European Commission in the defence of human and cultural rights defenders. This, in my view, could include a closer collaboration with the Council of Europe and particularly its Commissioner on Human rights, Michael O’Flaherty, who in his former position in charge of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) showed an interest in issues of artistic freedom.

Having said that I would appeal to the EU Commission to provide the FRA with resources to enable the documentation of violations of both artistic- and academic freedom in Europe. We are at a crucial situation where many cultural institutions, scholars, artists and the cultural industry face huge challenges from a multitude of quarters, financial and political.

How can the EU better integrate the protection and promotion of artistic freedom into its broader cultural and foreign policy frameworks?

Understandably, the EU needs to strike a balance in addressing the influence of Chinese, Russian, or Arab interests in Africa, which often come without human rights conditions, so addressing violations of artistic freedom can be sensitive. The EU does support initiatives through UNESCO, but I think it could go further by facilitating workshops or roundtables overseas, providing safe spaces for dialogue.

Local EU delegations together with EU member state delegations could easily invite local CSOs to provide information and discuss the artistic freedom situation in their countries and thus enhance the EU communications to the Commission. As part of EU Cultural Diplomacy, it would even benefit artistic freedom if cultural exchange programmes as a whole are well financed.

What steps can the EU take to strengthen its collaboration with civil society organisations and other stakeholders to effectively monitor and address threats to artistic freedom?

As mentioned earlier, civil society organisations in Europe are experiencing funding challenges, but they are the most efficient bodies in providing documentation and monitoring, and this requires essential and substantial long-term funding. It is also essential to create regular platforms of information exchange. Commissioner Micallef provided a fine example by inviting CSOs in March 2025 to provide in person inputs to a new Culture Compass for Europe with a follow up consultation survey in June and anticipated adoption by the College of Commissioner in November 2025. I would further suggest that the EU Parliament should discuss the violations in Europe and how to support the protection of artistic freedom on an annual basis.

Which specific EU funding instruments or programmes do you see as most effective for supporting artistic freedom, and how could their accessibility be improved for smaller organisations or independent artists?

It would be an advantage if funding from EU CULT as well as EU Democracy/Justice jointly were open for initiatives from CSOs. Artistic freedom and academic freedom cannot just be considered a cultural problem; they are fundamental for whom we are. And note, it is not only artists who currently face censorship, threats and restrictions in several EU countries. Artistic freedom is being challenged in the museum world, in the academic field as well as in festivals and galleries. We in the artistic freedom world are not screaming “the wolf is coming” – we are screaming “the wolf is here.”

In situations where artistic freedom is under immediate threat, such as censorship or repression, how could the EU respond quickly and effectively to protect artists and cultural organisations?

These violations must be addressed by the Commission, FRA, the EU Parliament and local EU offices. No government in the EU should be able to avoid criticism when they violate the EU Charter or the European Convention on Human Rights and member states must be motivated to upgrade their National Human Rights Institutes (NHRIs) to extend their documentation of violations to artistic freedom. The EU should also establish a complaint mechanism, to effectively and quickly receive complaints, evaluate these and take action.

Looking ahead, how do you see the role of the EU evolving in supporting artistic freedom over the next decade, particularly in response to rising political and economic pressures?

We know artistic freedom is being challenged in many European countries. However, we do not know to what extent this negatively affects our democratic dialogue and our cultural institutions. We do not have a clear picture of the negative financial consequences for the cultural industry of the suppression of this fundamental right. The best the EU can do is analyse these issues from a holistic point of view. We are talking about our culture, about our markets and our democratic values. If Europe does not stand up for our principles, who will?

Ole Reitov↗ is an internationally recognized expert and consultant on artistic freedom. As appointed member of the EU/UNESCO Expert Facility on the UNESCO 2005 Convention he facilitates workshops and panels worldwide and is consulted by international human rights and arts organisations. 

As co-founder and the Executive Director of Freemuse 2013-2017 he represented the organisation in the UN Human Rights Council. 

Originally a trained journalist he has working experience as a development expert, human rights advocate, and broadcaster from across the world.