*The interview in this article was carried out in early 2025, and has been reused for this piece as it remains relevant.
A Peruvian law in force since April 2025 lets the government vet the work of any media outlet or civil society organisation that receives foreign funding, requiring official approval before a project can begin and barring the use of that funding to sue the state.
In a country where independent investigative journalism relies on foreign donors, and where suing the state is often the only way to obtain public interest information it would rather withhold, the law hands officials an effective veto over the very reporting that exposes their own corruption.
Five investigative outlets are challenging this law with support from Media Defence, and for one of them, IDL-Reporteros, a Lima court has already struck down the law’s two most restrictive provisions. When the law first came into force we spoke to the outlet’s co-founders, Gustavo Gorriti and Romina Mella told Media Defence what the measure means on the ground.
What the Law Does
Peru’s Congress approved Law No. 32301 in March 2025, and it took effect on 14 April. The law expands the powers of the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI), giving it broad authority over any organisation that receives international funding, with no minimum threshold.
Under the law, such organisations must obtain approval from an APCI official, before beginning any project or activity, and the use of donor funds to bring legal action against the Peruvian state is now classified as a “very serious infraction.” Fines for breaching the requirements reach 500 tax units, roughly USD 720,000, the steepest monetary penalties in Peru’s legal system (higher even than the cap for money laundering) and repeat offenders can lose their registration or face dissolution. In Peru much of the independent investigative press is dependent on international foundations because commercial advertising does not reach it.
The government presented the legislation as a necessary transparency measure. When then President Dina Boluarte signed the law, she said that it would “protect the supreme interests of democracy and national unity and subject a minority of NGOs that act against the interests of our country, sowing hatred and attacking our system, to exhaustive scrutiny.”
Boluarte’s national security rhetoric is familiar territory, it is the recourse of leaders eager to extend their grip on civil society, who know that a spectral ‘foreign’ threat is a reliable tool against dissent and critique. Making foreign funding contingent on state approval means that carrying out the kind of journalism that has exposed corruption at the highest levels of Peruvian public life has become exponentially more difficult.
What the Law Means for Newsrooms
Gustavo Gorriti understood exactly who the law was targeting. The founder and director of IDL-Reporteros and one of Latin America’s most decorated investigative reporters, he has spent decades exposing government corruption and was forcibly disappeared for two days by intelligence agents during the 1992 Fujimori coup, before international pressure secured his release. Co-founder and managing editor at IDL-Reporteros, Romina Mella is an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) member and has contributed to seminal investigations including the Panama Papers, the FinCEN Files, and the Pandora Papers. Media Defence spoke to both shortly after the law passed last year.
For Gorriti, the prior approval requirement is the most immediate danger; “When it is translated into the exercise of journalism, [it] essentially means that we have a system of prior restraint,” he said. “Before publishing any report, any investigation which are regarded in terms of the law as “projects”, we will need the approval of the [APCI] agency to do that. And that essentially means prior censorship.”
Beyond the prior approval mechanism, the law’s extensive reporting requirements expose the one thing investigative journalism depends on most, its sources. “We have to provide very, very detailed information on every single expense that we incurred in the making of the reporting” Gorriti warned, “which obviously means that without any great exercise of intelligence, they will be able to trace all the steps we did and quite likely the sources we contacted.” The government’s use of transparency as justification drew his contempt. “In the completely crooked way in which they mean transparency, [it] means to them that we should put all our sources and our methods of investigative reporting in their hands.”
Mella added that the potential financial repercussions of not complying are insurmountable for most outlets; “If we didn’t give the information about the projects, the state may impose fines and also have the power to close the outlet. Just the amount of the fines could be fatal, because there is no [independent] media outlet that will be able to pay that.”
Even before any sanction is imposed, the law has become a drain on the newsrooms it covers. Fabiola Torres, founder of the Lima health-news site Salud con Lupa, told the Committee to Protect Journalists she had taken on both an accountant and a lawyer simply to keep up with the law’s registration and reporting requirements, a burden that falls hardest on the small, independent outlets least able to absorb it.
Then there is the ban on litigation against the state, which cuts off a tool Peruvian journalists have long relied on. Freedom of information suits are how outlets like IDL-Reporteros force the release of public records needed for investigations into potential corruption or human rights abuses. “We usually were able to sue the state, and in many cases they would be compelled to provide us the information,” Gorriti said. “Now it’s completely out of bounds.”
When Watchdogs Are Painted as Wolves
The law did not appear in isolation, but as part of a broader effort to suppress civil society against a backdrop of worsening political instability. For years, a campaign of disinformation has worked to recast accountability journalists in Peru not as public watchdogs but as foreign-funded adversaries.
That campaign is inseparable from the story of IDL-Reporteros itself. Gorriti and his team helped unravel what became arguably the largest corruption scandal in Latin American history, the Odebrecht affair, known across Latin America as Lava Jato, in which the Brazilian construction giant financed political campaigns and bribed officials across twelve countries to win billions in public contracts. IDL-Reporteros sat at the centre of the Peruvian investigation, work that won it the GIJN Global Shining Light Award in 2019. Four former Peruvian presidents were indicted, one of them, Alan García, took his own life as police arrived at his home to arrest him over bribery allegations.
What followed for Gorriti was a sustained campaign of intimidation on several fronts. State prosecutors opened investigations that press freedom groups widely condemned as politically motivated, including an effort to compel him to surrender confidential sources. A disinformation campaign spread false claims about his health. Far-right protesters surrounded the IDL-Reporteros newsroom and pelted it with rubbish and gathered outside his home carrying signs that depicted him as a rat and chanting antisemitic abuse.
Mella explained this pattern as a form of retaliation: “the officials and parties behind these harassment and disinformation campaigns have been the subjects of important investigations by Peru’s independent media outlets.”
The attacks work to conflate independent outlets such as IDL-Reporteros, in the public mind, with partisan politics and foreign interference. By the time she signed the APCI Law, it could be presented as a transparency measure rather than a restriction on independent media.
In 2025 alone, Peru’s National Journalists Association recorded 458 attacks on the press, a 17 percent rise on the previous year, with nearly half attributed to public officials. That same year four journalists were murdered, all of them working in small towns or regional capitals far from Lima, the highest toll in a single year since the war against the Shining Path in the 1980s.
In September 2025, Lima’s mayor, Rafael López Aliaga, the subject of IDL-Reporteros reporting since the Panama Papers exposed his offshore companies in 2017, suggested publicly that Gorriti should be “taken,” a remark widely read as a veiled threat on his life.
In June 2026, Peru’s Congress approved a commission report recommending criminal charges against Gorriti over a 2019 plea deal between prosecutors and Odebrecht that he had no part in negotiating. More than 230 journalists and press freedom organisations from 18 countries condemned it as an attempt to silence him.
The Legal Challenge
In May 2025, five independent outlets, IDL-Reporteros, OjoPúblico, Convoca.pe, Salud con Lupa, and Epicentro TV, mounted a coordinated challenge to the law, each filing its own amparo, Peru’s constitutional protection action, in courts around the country. The Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL), parent organisation of IDL-Reporteros, filed before the Sixth Constitutional Court of Lima, naming the Congress, the executive, and the APCI as respondents.
On 6 January 2026, the court ruled for IDL, declaring three articles of the law inapplicable to the organisation, among them its two most restrictive provisions. It held that the prior approval requirement violated the constitutional right of association, finding that conditioning an association’s activities on the state’s permission is unconstitutional “even when in appearance it does not impede their constitution.” It also set aside the provision classifying litigation against the state as a “very serious infraction,” reasoning that less intrusive tools, audits and reporting obligations among them, could secure transparency without cutting off legal representation for vulnerable communities.
The ruling was an important early step, though a narrow one, applying only to IDL. Media Defence together with partner organisations, has since submitted an amicus curiae brief supporting the challenges brought by OjoPúblico, Convoca.pe, Salud con Lupa, and Epicentro TV, arguing that the prior approval mechanism amounted to indirect censorship, that the ban on litigation against the state failed any proportionality test, and that the law’s vague definitions of “infringement” breached the principle of legality. A separate amicus in support of IDL-Reporteros’ challenge is forthcoming.
It argues that Peruvian courts must also measure the law against Peru’s international human rights treaty obligations, where the standard is stricter. In that context, it makes three arguments. The registration requirement singles out foreign-funded organisations for discriminatory treatment, fostering a climate of suspicion that is incompatible with a democratic society, the prior approval mechanism hands APCI officials unlimited and unreviewable discretion of a kind international law does not permit, and the sanctions are grossly disproportionate to any legitimate aim. On every count, the brief contends, the law falls short of what Peru has bound itself to uphold.
Part of a Global Pattern
For over a decade, governments around the world have reached for the same instrument, dressed as transparency and the defence of national sovereignty but built to burden, stigmatise, and silence organisations that take foreign money. Russia’s 2012 foreign agents law set the template. Hungary’s 2017 law on foreign-funded NGOs borrowed its logic before the Court of Justice of the European Union struck it down in 2020, and in 2024 both Georgia and Kyrgyzstan passed their own versions, with Georgia’s prompting the European Union to suspend the country’s accession process. Egypt’s 2019 NGO law placed comparable restrictions on foreign-funded organisations across the country.
In Latin America, Nicaragua has outlawed thousands of organisations since 2018, Venezuela has armed its government with broad powers to dissolve them, El Salvador’s Foreign Agents Law (Decree 308, 2025) imposes sweeping registration, taxation, and oversight requirements on internationally funded organisations and Paraguay’s Law No. 7,363 of 2024 imposes sweeping restrictions on non-profits. In their most extreme form these laws shut organisations down outright, but more often they work by attrition, making survival precarious and contingent on the decisions of officials answerable to the same governments those organisations scrutinise.
Gorriti situates the Peruvian law within that wider landscape. “The essentially philanthropic support from foreign foundations has been absolutely crucial,” he said. “Without that, this very creative, very intense wave of non-profit investigative reporting publications couldn’t have existed, [and] some of the most important investigations that have ever been published [in Peru] couldn’t exist.” He sees several pressures converging at once, the APCI Law, the withdrawal of USAID funding, the retreat of major foundations, and intensifying disinformation attacks, all bearing down together. “We really are part of a system, and this whole system is very close to the breaking point.”
The international reaction has been pronounced. Four UN special rapporteurs warned, before the law even passed, that it carried “serious implications for human rights,” and the IACHR raised the alarm in May 2025 that the ban on funding litigation against the state could strip indigenous peoples, women’s rights groups, LGBTI+ organisations, and victims of grave abuses of their legal representation.
That July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights took the rare step of ordering Peru to guarantee that lawyers representing victims in cases before it, among them the Mashco Piro and Georgina Gamboa cases, could keep working without reprisal under the law.
What Comes Next
January’s ruling, although encouraging, left the law largely intact and may yet be appealed, while the broader challenge continues and the other five outlets’ cases move through the courts.
Meanwhile, the political ground keeps shifting. Boluarte herself was impeached in October 2025. Her successor as president, José Jerí, lasted four months before Congress removed him over corruption allegations in February 2026, and was replaced in turn by José María Balcázar, leaving Peru with its eighth president in a decade.
Peru’s June 2026 presidential runoff was decided only after a razor-thin count, with Roberto Sánchez leading the domestic vote before ballots from abroad carried Keiko Fujimori to victory. On 3 July, the electoral authority declared Fujimori the winner by roughly 49,000 votes, 50.13 percent to 49.87. She takes the presidency on 28 July while her party already commands a strong bloc in Congress, consolidating power in the hands of a movement built around the legacy of her father, Alberto Fujimori, the autocrat under whose intelligence services Gorriti was once disappeared, and whose 1990s abuses are among the cases that human rights litigation against the state has sought to redress. For the outlets challenging the APCI Law, the prospect heightens the stakes.
As Gorriti put it, “It’s very sad that I will have to put our activity, our journalistic activity, now under the definition of fighting,” he said. “But unfortunately, the fighting has to be. We have to survive in order to fight, and to fight in order to survive.”
