19 Nov 2025 | Africa, Algeria, Americas, Awards, Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News, Turkey, Venezuela
At a time of rising authoritarianism and populism around the world, crackdowns on protest rights and a stark increase in transnational repression against those forced into exile, Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2025 honour the individuals and groups who, while often overlooked by the international community, are examples of what the fightback looks like.
In a ceremony in London, hosts include Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, comedian Rosie Holt, campaigner Bianca Jagger, and playwright David Hare, all there to celebrate four winners for their outstanding and courageous commitment to defending freedom of expression – often an immense personal risk.
The 2025 Freedom of Expression Awards winners are:
Arts:
- Mohamed Tadjadit (Algeria) – an activist and poet, currently imprisoned for his work. Nicknamed the Poet of Hirak, Mohamed has been imprisoned six times since 2019 for his poetry and activism, until he was rearrested in January 2025 and sentenced to one year in prison on trumped up terrorism-related charges. This sentence was extended mid-November by another five years, with another hearing scheduled for 30 November.
Campaigning:
- The Saturday Mothers (Turkey) – the longest peaceful protest movement in Turkish history calls for justice for those forcibly disappeared. Having faced judicial harassment, smear campaigns and police violence for the last three decades, in March 2025, 45 people stood trial for participating in the 2018 vigil, which was subject to a ban by the authorities, and were finally acquitted.
Journalism:
- Carlos Correa (Venezuela) – a veteran journalist working to protect the broader civic space and challenge the state’s human rights abuses at a time of a severe clampdown on media freedom in Venezuela. This came at a huge risk to himself, after he was abducted and disappeared in January 2025 by state security forces. He was held for over a week, without access to his lawyer or family before being released.
Trustee award:
- Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (Belarus) – Belarus opposition leader who campaigns for democracy and freedom of all political prisoners in Belarus, currently based in exile for her own security. Ahead of the stolen 2020 presidential election, Mrs Tsikhanouskaya stepped in as a presidential candidate after her husband was arrested and imprisoned. She has tirelessly campaigned for the return of Belarusian democracy and advocated for the hundreds of political prisoners held in Lukashenka’s prisons.
Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, said:
“It was a particularly hard year to judge as the threats to free expression continue to grow, which also means the individuals and organisations willing to confront autocracy are growing too. In these winners we are reminded of extreme courage at a time when all around us darkness seems to be descending. May their stories act as examples for all of us, including those of us in the UK who have fortunately been able to take basic rights largely for granted, but who are now seeing that nothing, not even freedom of expression, is guaranteed.
We also hope the awards shine light on all too often overlooked areas of the world, including nearby Belarus, and in so doing support both the individuals and their broader causes.”
The winners are announced on 19 November at a ceremony in London. The jury panel for the 2025 awards included Baroness Hollick OBE; Can Dündar, award-winning journalist; Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, chair of Index on Censorship; Ben Preston, Culture, Arts and Books Editor of The Times & Sunday Times; and Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship.
The 2025 Freedom of Expression Awards are sponsored by Rosenblatt Law (headline sponsor), Edwardian Hotels (event sponsor), News UK (Journalism), and the Hollick Family Foundation (Campaigning).
ENDS
Media contact:
Index on Censorship is a non-profit organisation that campaigns for and defends free expression worldwide, including by publishing work by censored writers and artists and monitoring threats to free speech. We lead global advocacy campaigns to protect artistic, academic, media and digital freedom to strengthen the participatory foundations of modern democratic societies. www.indexoncensorship.org
19 Nov 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News, United Kingdom
“Remember to always follow BBC standards. If your information cannot be confirmed by two independent sources, don’t publish the article.” This was the advice my first editor-in-chief gave me when I started working as an intern at the foreign desk of Magyar Hírlap, a daily Hungarian newspaper where I began my career.
The same advice was echoed when a few years later, I entered the doors of Hungary’s national public radio. We took “impartiality, accuracy and fairness” seriously. And for us, serving the public as a journalist was not merely a job, it was a vocation.
Having been born in 1980, I have only vague memories of what it was like when state TV and radio were under the control of the Communist Party. Although Hungary was known as the happiest barracks in Soviet times, this of course did not mean that journalists were free to write whatever they wanted. So, when the Iron Curtain fell and journalism became independent, fact-based and public-oriented once again, we needed to adopt guidelines we could look up to. The BBC seemed like a good place to start, as the organisation had a decades-long history of impartial, accurate and fair reporting that we had lacked for some time.
Almost 20 years later, Hungarian public media could not be further away from these principles.
In the aftermath of the 2010 election victory of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian government initiated a programme of measures designed to exercise control over the media. Utilising a two-thirds majority, the Fidesz party successfully implemented a comprehensive overhaul of Hungary’s media legislation, culminating in the appointment of individuals with strong allegiances to Fidesz within the nation’s media regulatory body. The centralisation of state media, including the national news agency, distributing news to every newsroom in the country free of charge, was of particular significance.
Over the years, more than 1,600 journalists and media workers at the national public media company (MTVA) were fired and replaced with people who would support the government’s story.
By today, Hungary’s public media has effectively been turned into a government mouthpiece.
Human Rights Watch learned from one current and one former employee at M1, a public service television channel under MTVA, that reporters are instructed by their editors on the subjects to be covered, the terminology to be used, and the subjects to be avoided. Should a reporter disagree, they are told to resign. In a leaked audio recording from a 2019 meeting, Balazs Bende, foreign news editor at public service broadcaster M1, can be heard telling staff: “this institution does not support the opposition coalition,” and “we all work accordingly,” and that “anyone who doesn’t like it should resign”.
Public television and radio channels consistently echo the talking points disseminated by Fidesz and a network of think tanks and pollsters that receive funding from the government and the party. In contrast, opposition politicians have long complained that they are allocated a mere five minutes of airtime every four years on public television, the legal minimum, to present their platforms before elections.
It is clear that how public media works has a direct effect on democracy and the rule of law. The government’s control stops people from being able to hold the government to account and stops people from getting information. In Hungary, there are still many people – especially in the countryside – who do not use the internet daily and only watch what the public TV and radio stations have to offer. So, they won’t even know about the corruption scandals exposed by the independent media. If they only hear one side of the story, they won’t be able to make an informed choice when it comes to the elections.
As the example shows, if public media outlets fail to do their job and are unable to resist political pressure, this can have serious consequences for the journalists working there and for society as a whole. This kind of pressure is now common not only in Hungary but throughout the world. So, it is all the more important that established and respected public media outlets – including the BBC – resist political pressure and set an example. If they stick to their own rules and always stand by them, they can’t be undermined.
Conversely, failure to do so will result in the inevitable.
18 Nov 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, Letters from Afghan Women, News
Roma Ayuobi once had a promising career. Then the Taliban came back to power. Now she is jobless. She lives in Kabul, with her husband and young child. Her house is cold and her son is unwell. She’s worried that she can’t pay for the help he needs.
We asked Ayuobi to write about what it means to be an Afghan woman today as part of our new project, Letters from Afghan Women, where we offer a platform to women from inside the country to speak freely on whatever they feel those outside need to know. She said that writing this article was one of the best moments for her recently.
What is clear, and history bears witness to, is that life under the Taliban passes in hardship and anguish. Their second rule has brought endless trouble for all, but none more so than for the brave women and girls who dare to resist. Now we live in a time heavy with sorrow, with no light of hope ahead – for Afghan women have been pushed out of both public and private life, denied a full education, their once vibrant presence erased, their colours drained from the tapestry of society. The girls who once dreamed of shaping a brighter future instead live beneath a dark roof – a roof that has sealed away their light for 1,800 days and counting.
Is this what remains for us – Afghan women and girls – to stand outside the circle of our own rights, unseen in the world we helped build?
The courageous Afghan women, who have fought for their rights throughout history, struggle to even step outside their homes to earn a piece of bread for their displaced families. Because of their struggle, many have been arrested and subjected to brutal torture. Some have lost their lives; others have been forced to flee the country illegally, carrying nothing but their pain, surviving in the margins of foreign lands.
Even beyond Afghanistan’s borders, in neighbouring countries, safety remains an illusion. One Afghan woman activist was even recently attacked in Europe [in Germany] by those who cannot bear her voice.
For Afghan women, danger has never ended, it only changes its shape. What we are witnessing is not just a step back in time, but a calculated effort to erase women from every corner of public life.
These restrictions could have disastrous consequences for women with no mahram (‘male guardians’). Because the presence of women in a society is life-giving.
The obliteration of education stands as the Taliban’s most cruel and symbolic act – their war on knowledge, their battle against women. They cloak their prohibitions in the shadow of Sharia, but nowhere in true faith is there a command that strips women and girls of the right to learn or to work. Even the sacred texts speak of knowledge as a light meant for all, men and women alike.
They have chained women to darkness, to a life without knowledge, without voice.
Among all these injustices, women’s health stands on the edge of catastrophe. So many women are at risk, yet even the doctors who could save them are forbidden to work. Those who wish to travel into perilous, remote villages to reach suffering women are stopped – for they cannot move without a male guardian. And so, what might have been life-saving care becomes silence, and too often, becomes death. Indeed the deaths of mothers and children, once heartbreakingly common, is multiplying again.
What unfolds in Afghanistan is more than tragedy; it is a warning to the world. For a nation that silences its women silences its own future – leaving only darkness where hope once lived.
They may erase women from sight, but can they ever silence their voices? No, they can never silence the voice of a grieving mother whose cries echo across the world.
Even under such crushing silence, the fire of Afghan women has not gone out. In hidden rooms and secret schools, they still learn, dreaming of a day when life will be theirs again.
Afghan women cannot wait for the hands that oppress them to also deliver justice; their rights will not be handed down by corruption but reclaimed through their own courage.
They must take up the struggle themselves and reclaim what is theirs. But whenever they cry out, countless women and girls are struck – in body and spirit. Their families, too, suffer reprisals.
When women and girls step outside their homes, simply to walk, to breathe, even then, they cannot draw an easy breath. From every direction, harsh voices shout: “Where is your hijab? Why is your hair showing? Where is your mahram? You have no right to be here!”
If a girl dares to answer back to such words, she risks brutal violence – and defending herself only brings greater danger.
These very restrictions have forced many girls into early and arranged marriages, because continuing life under such conditions has become unbearable. Forced marriage is a deep wound in the lives of many girls in this sleeping land.
If we look closely, women make up half the body of humanity, yet throughout history, their rights have been trampled underfoot.
I wanted to hear from some of the anguished women and girls of this country whose voices have been silenced. A young woman, who always dreamt of serving her community as a capable doctor, says:
“Life feels unbearably heavy. Each day I ask myself: why have we become dimmed lamps in our own country? We are not even allowed to study unless a man shadows us. When the world turned against me, I had no choice but to work on the streets, earning what little I can to feed my family. Without a guardian, even my right to exist now belongs to them.”
A mother, who struggles to provide for her children, says:
“I work in a private office, but since the Taliban came to power, security has worsened. They dismissed many women from their jobs, and even those who remain have not received their salaries for months. Life has become twice as hard. Even as I scrub the floors, my mind wanders home – wondering what waits for me there?”
One more woman speaks, her voice carrying the weight of lost dreams, dreams she once held before this rule began:
“My pen was meant to fight for other women and girls. I always dreamed of being a voice for the voiceless, of carrying their silence to every institution that would listen. But with the arrival of this dark regime – a reality too painful even to imagine – all those dreams were buried alive. These endless horrors have doubled the hardship of my life. I have lost so much – even my home and belongings were taken from me because I was a woman who wrote and spoke in the media. I am no longer allowed to travel from one province to another without a male guardian. And the words that echo endlessly in my mind are always the same: ‘Where is your guardian? You are not allowed outside. Go back inside.’ They have locked the doors of life itself and with them, the end of my dreams.”
And so it is for many women, caught in the unending struggle of hardship and survival.
Is this the life we are meant to live, where even outside our homes we cannot witness life itself? Oh, this dark roof – it has smothered the air, choking the last traces of humanity!
Still we hold onto the hope that one day our country will break free from the chains of Taliban rule, and once again, its women will stand, fight and build a brighter, more progressive Afghanistan.
Translated from Dari by Shukria Rezaei
17 Nov 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News
For years, many of the world’s most polluted cities were in China. I was in Beijing during the “airpocalyse” peak and it felt like living in an ashtray. Everyone could see the problem. Except not everyone could talk about it. The US Embassy’s popular and trusted air quality data feed – a constant source of irritation for the authorities, contradicting as it did the government’s own data – was sporadically blocked, including in 2014 during the Apec summit. Viral jokes, memes and photos posted on particularly bad days were frequently removed.
Then in 2015 a documentary was produced. Under the Dome challenged the government’s inadequate response and confronted head on the line that what citizens were experiencing was simply fog. The film was initially endorsed by Beijing and within days of its release it had been viewed by hundreds of millions. Except its success was its flaw. One week in and the film was taken offline.
The thing about air though is that it largely doesn’t discriminate. Yes, the wealthy can buy top-of-the-range air filtration systems but eventually everyone needs to go outside. And so as much as the Chinese Communist Party might have felt uncomfortable by the popularity of the film, they felt more uncomfortable about the shoddy quality of the air. They acted. Today air quality in China is seismically better than a decade prior.
There’s a sense of déjà vu looking at India today. In Delhi, where pollution now kills more people than obesity or diabetes, residents are frustrated that they might not be getting the full truth – allegations have even been made that the BJP tamper with the city’s pollution data, claims they have denied. And the population is frustrated that the government is doing little to deal with the issue. So last weekend a protest was planned. A striking poster for it read “We Rise While We Choke”, accompanied by a picture of a two people in heavy-duty masks embracing. The protest didn’t go as planned. In the days leading up to it, Delhi police made hundreds of calls and home visits to those who were galvanising crowds. On the day itself, the police shut down India Gate, the meeting point, and detained close to 100 protesters. The next day, a police case was filed against the organisers.
One of the main organisers of Sunday’s protest, Saurav Das, told Index that the police’s actions were “completely uncalled for”.
India has form more broadly when it comes to threatening people speaking out on the climate. In Tamil Nadu in 2018 police fired into crowds of protesters who were opposing the expansion of a copper smelting plant, killing 13. In 2021 Disha Ravi, a founder of Fridays for Future India, was arrested and accused of sedition. These are just two examples in a pattern of increasingly hostile and dangerous conditions for environmental defenders under Narendra Modi.
For Das, Sunday’s protest “was a small act of resistance against the taking away of their democratic spaces”.
Free speech should not be a luxury. Nor should clean air. The sooner Indian politicians realise this the better.
