 It has become something of a cliché within human rights circles to talk about the closing space for civil society. But this is not a cliché to activists and civil society organizations who are working in increasingly hostile environments and authoritarian societies. And you're going to hear from those brave people this afternoon. You'll hear about their challenges, but you will also hear about their solutions, their ingenuity, their resolve, and their hope. You will hear that in many ways the tools of authoritarian leaders have not changed. In too many places still they include political violence, imprisonment, torture, even extrajudicial killing. But in many ways the tools have changed. They include more subtle tactics like propaganda, co-optation of the media, cyber politics, bringing shame and disrepute upon organizations, infiltrating their operations. Actions like this hit us particularly hard as an AIDS movement. We are a movement born in protest. If it were not for our human right to peacefully assemble, to protest, to associate, to express our views, to offer a different vision of society than our leaders, many of us would not be alive today. And make no mistake, while we are here strategizing about how to preserve space for civil society, right-wing leaders are also strategizing about how to close that space. They're exchanging drafts of model laws on how to shut down NGOs. They are refining techniques of cyber hacking in order to disrupt operations. They are engaging in deliberate fake news and propaganda campaigns. So this panel today is not just an act of sharing strategies and learning. It is an act of resistance. It is an act of transnational gathering, precisely the kind of transnational gathering that the leaders of too many countries do not want us to have. And that's what makes it a particular honor for us to co-chair this event.