?An urgent matter?: Biden warns democracy is under threat at summit

Joe Biden has launched his virtual Summit for Democracy with a warning that democratic rights and norms are under threat around the world, including in the US.

Facing video links with 80 world leaders arrayed on two oversize electronic panels, the US president said: "This is an urgent matter on all our parts, in my view, because the data we're seeing is largely pointing in the wrong direction."

Biden cited studies that found that global freedom has now been in retreat for 15 consecutive years and that more than half of all democracies experienced a decline in the past decade.

He acknowledged that one of those countries in democratic decline was his own. Since the November 2020 elections - the result of which is still not accepted by many supporters of the loser, Donald Trump - voting rights have been under assault from Republicans on the state level, where gerrymandering is still rife, carried out by both Republicans, and to a lesser extent, Democrats.

Biden has been accused by American progressives of hosting a global summit while not doing enough to combat democratic backsliding at home. In New York, activists staged a "funeral for democracy" outside the United Nations, in protest of US voter suppression laws.

Opening the two-day summit, Biden announced a string of initiatives aimed at giving concrete support to civil rights where they are most embattled, with a total spend of $424m. Some of that money will go to independent media in places where they are under threat, through a fund to be run by "leading international media experts".

The US Agency for International Development (USaid) will also establish a global "defamation defence fund" to provide liability coverage for investigative journalists against what Biden described as "nuisance lawsuits designed to prevent them from doing their vital work around the world".

Another focus on Biden's pro-democracy initiative is combating corruption, and USaid will run a series of projects to monitor and target corruption networks and protect whistleblowers, civil society groups and others fighting corruption in their home countries.

On the eve of the summit, the White House put out a fact sheet on what the administration was doing to shore up democratic norms in the US, including doubling the number of voting rights attorneys in the justice department and improving access to voter registration.

The list included few substantive actions directly connected to protecting access to the ballot. Most notably, the White House and Senate Democrats have failed to pass two important pieces of voting rights legislation stalled in Congress.

A section on voting rights, for example, mentioned the way that some federal agencies were making it easier to vote, a welcome development to voting advocates, but unlikely to have widespread effect. The release also mentioned that the justice department had issued guidance, essentially an explanation of what the law says, on existing laws. That kind of limited action, critics say, is outmatched by Republicans' staggering effort to draw distorted political districts, enact sweeping new voting restrictions, and take more partisan control of election administration in many states.

"You have to be kidding me," tweeted James Slattery, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project. He described the fact sheet as "minor tweaks on the edges of the problem".

On the first day of the summit, a watchdog group, Civicus Monitor, reported that nine out of 10 of the world's population live in countries where civic freedoms are severely restricted. Its report downgraded the democratic standing of 13 countries, including Belgium, Czech Republic and Poland, who were invited to the summit.

Hungary was the only EU country not to receive an invitation. Across the rest of Europe, Serbia and Kosovo were invited, but Bosnia and Herzegovina was not, causing consternation in Sarajevo. An invitation to Taiwan outraged China, although it did not attend as a sovereign state.

The Russian and Chinese ambassadors to Washington published a joint commentary in the National Interest, denouncing the Biden administration for adopting a divisive "cold-war mentality", and claiming that their authoritarian states were simply other models of democracy.

Pakistan pulled out of the summit on Thursday, in a moment that was abruptly announced by the foreign ministry, without giving a reason.

A source at the ministry of foreign affairs in Islamabad said that Pakistan is not taking part in it, as China was not invited.

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, Islamabad has been treated coolly by Washington. Biden has yet to telephone the prime minister, Imran Khan.