Four South Asian states, four different legal vocabularies, one converging outcome: a civil society organization's ability to receive money from abroad is treated not as an incident of the right to associate, but as a permission the state may grant, withhold, or withdraw at will.
South Asian states
India now requires every recipient organization to bank through a single, government-designated branch in New Delhi.
India's model is the region's best known. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, tightened substantially in 2020. India now requires every recipient organization to bank through a single, government-designated branch in New Delhi, it bars any transfer of foreign funds to another organization at all, and gives the state power to suspend a registration for up to a year before any final finding is made.
More than sixteen thousand NGO registrations have been cancelled over the past decade.
When the Supreme Court tested this framework in Noel Harper v Union of India (2022), it accepted the government's own submission virtually without qualification. The Court agreed that no organization has an inherent right to receive foreign contributions. More than sixteen thousand NGO registrations have been cancelled over the past decade.
Nepal's architecture looks different on paper and, in one respect, is even more exacting. Under the Social Welfare Council Act and the Foreign Aid Policy, an NGO does not simply register once and comply thereafter; it must submit each individual foreign-funded project to the Social Welfare Council for prior approval.
An NGO must then secure a further sign-off from the Ministry of Finance, before a single rupee may lawfully arrive. Approval precedes the transaction rather than following it; prior restraint is built directly into the ordinary course of funding, not reserved for exceptional cases.
Pakistan... every international NGO... must seek fresh government approval before accepting funding from any new source or opening any new office.
Pakistan combines registration with a security-clearance apparatus that extends beyond either. Under the 2015 Ministry of Interior policy, every international NGO must be cleared by a multi-agency committee that includes the country's principal intelligence services. They sign a memorandum of understanding, but then must seek fresh government approval before accepting funding from any new source or opening any new office, a standing requirement of prior permission for each subsequent transaction, not a one-time registration.
It is worth setting this beside the law most frequently invoked as the Western precedent for this kind of regulation, the United States' Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires registration and public disclosure but not prior government approval of who may fund an organization or when. Pakistan's regime is not a regional echo of FARA. It goes considerably beyond it.
Sri Lanka... a bill.. drafted with heavy involvement from the Ministry of Public Security.
Sri Lanka has not yet finished writing its own version of this story, and the drafting process is instructive in its own right. The country currently regulates NGOs under a fragmented, decades-old framework, but a new Non-Governmental Organizations Bill, drafted with heavy involvement from the Ministry of Public Security. The bill has had minimal consultation of the civil society groups it would govern, has been pending since 2024 and, tellingly, is being defended and debated in Colombo by direct reference to India's example.
A recent Sri Lankan civil society commentary explicitly warned that "India's tightened Foreign Contribution Regulation Act has forced thousands of NGOs to close," citing India not necessarily as a cautionary outlier but certainly as the visible endpoint of a path that Sri Lanka's own drafters appear willing to walk. The region's states are not arriving at this architecture independently. They are watching and, in some cases, citing one another.
International law
Access to funding, including from abroad, falls within the protection of (UN) Article 22.
Set against this pattern, international law's position is considerably narrower than any of these four regimes acknowledges. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association has stated plainly that access to funding, including from abroad, falls within the protection of Article 22 of the ICCPR. The UN argues that there exists a presumption in favor of the legality of an NGO's funding activities that the state, not the organization, bears the burden of displacing.
The Financial Action Task Force, the very body most often invoked to justify these laws, revised its own standard in 2016 specifically to remove language casting the entire non-profit sector as inherently vulnerable, insisting instead on regulation targeted at organizations identified through documented, individualized risk assessment.
Concerns about money laundering.
The Venice Commission has drawn the line with particular clarity: concerns about money laundering may justify enhanced reporting, but never an outright ban on ordinary fund transfers of the kind India's Section 7 and Pakistan's approval regime both impose. And where comparable laws have actually been tested in court outside the region, they have not survived contact with a serious proportionality analysis.
The Court of Justice of the European Union struck down Hungary's transparency law in 2020, and the European Court of Human Rights found Russia's foreign-agent framework disproportionate in 2022, in both cases rejecting sovereignty and transparency as sufficient justification on their own.
South Asia's foreign-funding laws are not converging toward that baseline. They are converging away from it, each new statute citing the last as evidence that the approach is normal rather than as a warning that it is not.
Breaking that cycle will require courts willing to ask the question their counterparts elsewhere have already asked, not whether a state may regulate foreign funding, which nobody disputes, but whether the specific mechanism chosen is necessary, proportionate, and actually justified by evidence rather than by the mere fact that a neighboring state has already done the same.
Robin Christopher Joseph serves as Legal Counsel at ADF International, supporting legal and advocacy initiatives across Asia relating to freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression and other fundamental rights. He holds an LL.M. from Azim Premji University, completed coursework in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford, and earned his law degree from Christ University.
