22 Dec 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, Features, Letters from Afghan Women
When I was only 16 years old and in the eleventh grade at school, the previous Afghan government fell, and my life, like that of thousands of other girls, changed. I was a girl with big dreams and a passion for learning, but with the arrival of the Taliban, the doors of school were closed to me, and all the hopes I had for the future turned to darkness. But I did not give up.
Despite not attending twelfth grade, I still participated in the university entrance exam with the permission of the local Taliban. I was accepted into an English programme at a good university. However, this success did not last, as the Taliban then prohibited girls from attending university. I never stepped foot inside the university.
A few girls and I decided to protest for our right to education. During the protest, Taliban forces arrived. While the others fled, I was caught. I was in Taliban custody for four hours and was only released with guarantees from my father and brother. Those terrifying moments still haunt me.
I was then unemployed, with time on my hands. My uncle, who lived abroad, fortunately sent me money and that allowed me to enrol in a private dental institute. Except it was a similar story: I studied diligently for two years and then the institute was closed.
I experienced something else terrible: a man who was part of the Taliban, a religious student, turned my life into hell. He wanted to marry me without my consent. I was only 16 years old at the time. He would come to our house at night, threaten us, saying to my parents that “if you do not give me your daughter, I will kill you all”. One day he grabbed me by force and violently beat me on the hands and feet. This man only left my life because he apparently committed a crime in the eyes of the Taliban themselves and for that he fled the country. I constantly live in fear that he will return.
Despite all these pains and emotional wounds, I have not yet surrendered. I have even managed to find work in a dental clinic. Most patients are women because families don’t usually allow women to interact with men for examination or treatment. I prefer to work with female patients – I feel safer with them.
None of this is easy. In the environment where I live, speaking freely on the street as a woman is always accompanied by feelings of fear and concern. When I leave the house for work or errands, I am very cautious. I go about my business quietly so as not to draw anyone’s attention. I am in contact with a limited number of women who, like me, face many restrictions. We sometimes talk and share our experiences. These interactions are often done in secret and conducted with great caution.
Even so, I believe that the right to education, the right to safety, and the right to live freely have not been taken from me; they are still alive, and I must stand up to achieve them. My wish is simple: to continue my studies, live in safety and help women and girls who share a similar fate. I do not want to remain a victim; I want to raise my voice so that a path may open, not just for myself but for all girls who are gasping under the shadow of oppression.
In telling my story, I want to depict a true picture of my daily life as an Afghan woman; a woman who, under the shadow of restrictions, gender discrimination, deprivation of education and social threats, still fights to survive, learn and stand firm. This narrative is not just an account of one day, but a depiction of the sufferings that the women of my country experience every day while men, in most cases, are safe from these pressures and deprivations. At night, with a heavy heart, I close my eyes; I pray that the day will come when neither I nor any girl in this country will be a victim simply because she is a woman.
Today I want the world to know that my life is not just statistics and news; I am a human with dreams that have been buried under ashes, yet my heart still beats for hope. I want them to know that we, the girls of this land, are not just seeking rescue; we want to live; with dignity, with the right to education, with security and with dreams that, like other humans, we have the right to achieve. I want the world to know that despite all the hardships, I am still standing and I do not want to be silent. I can be a voice for girls who are no longer allowed to shout. I try as much as possible to find time to speak the truth because ultimately silence only intensifies the pain.
Editor’s note: For her safety, the woman who wrote this letter requested that we change her name.
22 Dec 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Serbia
On the second evening of my stay in Belgrade, I wondered if someone had been rummaging around in my Airbnb. I was pretty sure that I’d double-bolted the door, but when I came back from the restaurant the door wasn’t bolted at all. It was as if it had just been pulled shut. There was nothing missing, though I searched the high-ceiling-ed narrow studio flat just to make sure someone wasn’t hiding behind a curtain or in a cupboard. The apartment was empty. And I comforted myself with the thought that an intruder wouldn’t have found much anyway. I only had a small backpack, and I had decided to take my phone and laptop everywhere I went.
Belgrade is a city which induces paranoia. I’d spent the last couple of days listening to journalists and human rights defenders talking about the unknown sonic weapon used against student demonstrators in March, and about an activist who had been arbitrarily detained for hours while spyware was installed on his phone. Amnesty International reports this is common practice now, and human rights defenders I spoke to try to check their phones regularly for spyware.
The Serbian authorities are not very friendly to foreign journalists either. Tamara Filipović, the secretary general of the Independent Journalists Association told me that Croatian and Slovenian reporters had been turned away at the border in March because they were a “threat to the country”.
But even more worrying, from my point of view, was the sinister camp just a five-minute walk away from my apartment known locally as Ćaciland. I was staying in the very centre of Belgrade and Ćaciland was in the Pionirski (Pioneer) park in front of the National Assembly building, a large baroque revival edifice in the centre of the city. The encampment was the brainchild of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who had called on the Serbian people to come and defend the parliament to protect it from student demonstrators.
The students have been up in arms for more than a year marching and blockading streets and university buildings, since the collapse of a concrete canopy in the newly rebuilt Novi Sad station which killed 16 people and injured many more in November 2024. Their initial demands: an investigation into why the station was so unsafe, and the suspected government corruption around the entire building project.
As the protests became more vociferous and attracted more members of the public, Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) decided to mount a counter demonstration. People – supposedly “students who wanted to study” – were recruited from round the country to come defend the parliament ahead of the March demonstrations (which were attended by more than 300,000 anti-government protesters). At one point in the recruitment drive, a phone line was set up and a local investigative journalist from the news channel N1 rang it to find out what would happen. He was told that he would be paid between 50 and 80 euros a day to sit and lie down. Women were paid the lower rate, according to one human rights defender I met.
Human Rights House Serbia celebrates Human Rights Day despite threats. Photo: Sally Gimson
In reality, it wasn’t students who were attracted to the camp, but, according to various sources, petty, and even some more serious criminals. The camp now extends to the whole park and into the carpark in front of the parliament building. I saw white tents with music, portable toilets and swarms of police officers, there “to protect” the demonstrators. I also saw what seemed to be more disturbing elements, older men in masks and woollen hats, who I was told were likely Serbian veterans from the 1990s Balkans war. Even if they weren’t, they were dressed to suggest that. The whole place was fenced off with provisional metal railings, used the world round for crowd control. A few days before I arrived the top of the fencing had been greased and no one knew what the substance was.
I didn’t take any pictures on my phone and was warned not to peer too closely as I walked past. Last month, a television crew from N1, which is one of the few independent TV companies in the capital, was attacked by a man from the camp who turned out to be a convicted murderer. He was identified through footage recovered by the cameraman after his equipment was smashed. In July 2025 reporters filming Ćaciland had eggs thrown at them.
A journalist told me that the camp combined the dystopian aspects of Black Mirror mixed with the comedy of The Simpsons. It is called Ćaciland because when the students first started blockading universities and striking over the Novi Sad disaster, someone scrawled graffiti outside a local secondary school urging students in the town to go back to school. The graffitist spelled the word students as Ćaci instead of the correct spelling of Đaci. It led to a joke about their lack of education, hence Ćaciland (probably best rendered in English as Chavland).
The worst thing according to human rights defender Uroš Jovanović is that the police didn’t defend the attacked journalists but allowed them to act with impunity. Most prosecutors’ offices are dragging their feet when complaints are made to them. Students and journalists on the other hand have been detained and charged with “not following police instructions”. In August in some parts of the country – this is not just a Belgrade movement – demonstrations turned violent, with police beating protesters and some masked people throwing fireworks and stones.
The fight in Serbia is between students and a president they accuse of deep-seated corruption. Academics and schoolteachers have supported their students too. One human rights campaigner said that 100 secondary school teachers have been laid off because of their support, and some 25 headteachers and co-principals dismissed. Many ordinary members of the public have joined the protests, like the 50-year-old woman I met in a café who had been on the marches and started talking to me unprompted. She told me she had lived through five regimes in her lifetime and Vućić’s was by far the worse. She hoped the government would be overthrown soon.
Like Gen Zers around the world the students eschew politics, discuss actions through “forums” and have no leadership structure so they can’t be dismantled by the authorities. They organise primarily over social media. Those who have broken cover or have been arrested have found intimate pictures of themselves disseminated online and in government media. They’ve also been doxxed and smeared. Women have been particularly affected. Biljana Janjic, the executive director of FemPlatz, said out of 170 female activists they talked to, 87 had been assaulted and attacked by the police and pro-regime activists, and that sexual violence and rape threats had been normalised by the police. In smaller communities, women have been much more vulnerable to such attacks. The students’ ideology is unclear, except they dislike mainstream politics which they believe is so fundamentally corrupt that it resembles a big pot of shit – as one disillusioned politician described it – so that anyone who takes part becomes covered in excrement.
Graffiti on the HRH headquarters in Belgrade. Photo: Sally Gimson
I heard a lot about the suppression of protest and the media, not only through individual conversations, but also at the Human Rights House (HRH), just down the road from the National Assembly and the Ćaciland encampment. The front of the office has been daubed with red graffiti which covers the HRH logo: the authorities have refused to remove it for them. At least the building still rents space to the HRH Serbia team, alongside other civic society organisations.
Last week the House organised an event to celebrate Human Rights Day. The meeting was open and defiant. The leaders were mainly women. They discussed the situation in Serbia and their fears about increasing repression. Prizes were given to the director of news at N1, who HRH workers said had been vital in defending them and giving them “the courage to stay and fight”. Prizes were also given to a small group of prosecutors called Let’s Defend our Professionalism, who were praised for defending the rule of law where most of their colleagues had toed the government line. A representative from the Russian HRH in exile handed on to the director Sonja Tosković and her team the Golden Dove of Peace.
Despite their mistrust of politics and the persecution of many activists and journalists, students are organising for elections and announcing their candidates on 28 December. But there is deep tension in Serbia. Students have a history of toppling governments they don’t like. In October 2000, Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in the 1990s war, was forced from power by a student-led revolution. In Belgrade’s Museum of Yugoslavia there is an celebratory exhibition about the 20th century revolutionary socialist politician Veljko Vlahović, a former student leader, and one of the leading figures in the communist government after the Second World War. In neighbouring Bulgaria, the government was overthrown by Gen Z students this December.
I’ll never know if someone really was in my apartment, but paranoia is rife in Serbia, and all have good cause to feel that way.
19 Dec 2025 | Africa, Features, Middle East and North Africa, Morocco, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
As the Africa Cup of Nations kicks off on Sunday and tens of thousands of football fans descend on Morocco, we should remember the thousands of Gen Z protesters who were arrested and beaten when they took to the streets following the death of eight women in a maternity hospital in Agadir. They are now being prosecuted and some – including minors under 12 – have already been sentenced to hundreds of years in prison. It was partly football that sparked the anger. Young people saw beautiful stadiums being built, but hospitals so crumbling they couldn’t even keep mothers safe. Read the full story by Omar Radi, whose piece appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025.
Saturday, 27 September. At Casablanca’s Arab League Park, riot police and plainclothes agents gather in uneasy groups. Their presence is heavy and full of expectation, a show of state power preparing for a confrontation it doesn’t fully understand. By late afternoon the reason for the confusion is clear. For the first time, the authorities are facing a youth protest movement without leaders, without clear origins, formed not in political party offices or student unions, but on Discord – a platform that feels almost like science fiction to old-style security forces. The youth are anonymous, impossible to track, and everywhere.
At first, they were gamers and football supporters – voices echoing through Discord chat rooms, more familiar with memes than with political public life. Politics had been something happening elsewhere. But then there was a shift. The country’s quiet crisis found its way into their feeds. The trigger? Eight women admitted into a maternity ward at a public hospital in Agadir, in southern Morocco. None came out alive – a shortage of staff, a lack of resources, and a system too broken to respond until it was too late.
Football’s soft power
Following Morocco’s unexpected fourth-place finish at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, football has become the cornerstone of the country’s soft power strategy. The momentum carried into 2023, when Morocco was awarded co-hosting rights for the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal – a diplomatic victory dressed in sport. Since then, public policy has tilted toward a single, obsessive goal: turning parts of the country’s major cities into acceptable playgrounds for the global guests who will descend upon Morocco for one month in 2030. Billions of dollars are being poured into infrastructure, stadiums and urban makeovers.
The contradiction, however, is hard to ignore. In a country where hospitals resemble warzones and schools are crumbling, the dazzling promise of football has become, for many, a bitter spectacle. Morocco is a nation in love with the game – few would deny that. But among its citizens, the joy of hosting the World Cup is tinged with disillusion. The tragic deaths of eight women during childbirth was a tipping point. For the country’s youth, the women’s fate was no longer just about bad governance. It was personal.
“We don’t want to do politics,” one young activist who uses Discord, told Index. “We’re not asking for a new constitution or a regime change. We just want our hospitals to be as good as our football stadiums.”
At 6.00pm, as the protest was set to begin, the government issued a blanket ban on all public gatherings across Morocco. In Casablanca, police blocked access to public squares, surrounded potential meeting points, and deployed familiar intimidation tactics – threats, beatings, arrests. Undeterred, young protesters splintered into smaller groups, reappearing in alleyways and side streets, improvising a kind of urban guerrilla choreography. The same scene played out across the country: cat-and-mouse chases, baton charges, and standoffs stretching late into the night.
One thing became immediately clear to Morocco’s notoriously powerful political police. This was a new kind of activism – more agile, more defiant, and far more determined than anything they had seen before.
Minors charged over protests
Figures released on 29 October by Morocco’s judicial authorities surpassed even the bleakest estimates shared by rights groups such as the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH). Of the 2,480 people swept up during the protests, 1,473 were still behind bars awaiting trial. The others, while free, have been ordered to appear before judges in due course.
The charges are familiar, hallmarks of the state’s playbook against public dissent: armed rebellion, incitement to commit felonies, participation in armed gatherings.
Hundreds of detainees are being pushed into the criminal justice system by way of more severe accusations: violent assembly, insulting law-enforcement officers, possession of offensive weapons.
The first rounds of sentencing, swift and unyielding, have already handed down hundreds of years of prison time to several dozen people, including a significant number of minors under the age of 12, with sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years.
In Lqliâa, a town on the outskirts of Agadir in Morocco’s south, security forces killed three protesters with live ammunition before moving in to arrest others. The authorities insist that the shootings were acts of self-defence. Yet no independent inquiry has been launched, and public opinion remains divided after videos contradicting the official narrative began to circulate on Discord.
What the state is offering
When King Mohammed VI finally addressed the nation on 10 October in a speech read to members of Morocco’s parliament, the country braced itself for some acknowledgment of the turmoil that had shaken Morocco in the preceding weeks. But the King made no mention of the unrest and did not offer even an oblique response to the demands surging through the streets.
The disappointment was palpable. Yet, the movement itself did not harden its stance. Its demands remain well short of any direct criticism of the monarchy. Still, the speech was widely felt as a deliberate slight – an act of indifference toward a generation that has insisted, from the outset, on peaceful protest and loyalty to the Crown.
“The King ghosted us. I feel humiliated,” said an organiser of the GenZ212 Discord server, which has played a key role in the demonstrations and now boasts 200,000 members.
Two weeks later, the King presided over a cabinet meeting that approved increased budgets for healthcare and education, as well as a new fund to support young candidates in upcoming elections.
There was money being offered by one hand, in the other an invitation into institutional politics. But for many, the gesture was not received as good news.
“It’s hard to believe these promises,” a young protester declared during a public meeting in Rabat. “There are no details, no assurances that any of this will be implemented effectively.”
His scepticism, he added, is only strengthened by the way the police and courts have treated protesters.
“Shouldn’t they start by releasing all the detainees?” he asked.
Gen Z: a new source of protest
The demonstrations continue. Persistent, if modest in scale, they rarely attract more than a few dozen people per city. To the movement’s initial demands for better healthcare and education, new calls have been added within GenZ212’s discourse: the release of detainees, the dismissal of all charges, and the end of the hogra – a Moroccan term for the violence and arrogance wielded by authority against the powerless.
For observers, journalists and scholars alike, a paradox sits at the centre of any analysis of this movement. On one hand, it is the smallest in numbers and the most restrained in its demands when compared with earlier, more overtly political movements, like the 20 February 2011 protests of the Arab Spring. On the other hand, the repression has been astonishingly severe – disproportionate both in terms of the movement’s size and its relatively “diplomatic” aspirations.
There is also the question of the mark the GenZ212 will leave behind. For the first time, a protest movement in Morocco did not emerge from the political left, political Islam, or labour unions. Instead, it was born out of activity on online chat groups – out of a kind of virtual street. It was immediately echoed, even if only verbally, by social categories traditionally aligned with the regime: artists, influencers, sports champions.
Raid, a Casablanca-based rapper, became an early casualty of this shift. Arrested, released, then rearrested and placed in police custody before being charged with inciting illegal demonstrations, he has become one of the most emblematic figures of the movement, alongside others who lent their voices to the cause. Songs, art performances, widely followed podcasts: all rallied behind the movement, at least in its early days.
Here is a generation that declared itself apolitical from the outset – yet through just a few missteps by those in power was pushed headlong into politics. A generation now shouting to the world: “No, there is no freedom in Morocco – and we are the proof”.
On the streets, the popular dialect, laced with profanity, usually banished from state media, schools and family spaces, has forced its way into political life. As one protester yelled: “Free freedom, you sons of bitches!”
19 Dec 2025 | Americas, Asia and Pacific, Australia, Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News, Palestine, United Kingdom, United States
On Wednesday Greater Manchester Police and Metropolitan Police said they’d arrest individuals who amplify the slogan “globalise the intifada”. They clearly meant business. No sooner had they made the announcement that they arrested two for just that. This comes in the wake of the atrocity on Bondi Beach, Sydney, in which fifteen people were killed. This attack was unambiguously antisemitic. It followed the murder of two Jewish people on Yom Kippur in Manchester and two people in Washington DC leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. It followed a foiled plot for the mass murder of Jews in Preston. All of these in addition to skyrocketing incidents of everyday antisemitism.
The case made by Sir Mark Rowley and Sir Stephen Watson is that the recent series of antisemitic attacks since 7 October 2023 have changed the context in which the phrase “globalise the intifada” should be understood.
Whenever speech is restricted, it rightly comes onto our radar and our instinct is to scrutinise such decisions closely. As a matter of principle we support the right of anyone to speak freely as long as their words are lawful and are not obviously intended to cause physical harm to others. Thus we have always defended a wide range of speech, including speech that is offensive, sometimes deeply so, or unsettling, but we do not defend hate speech or incitement to violence. This approach is in line with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression as a qualified right.
Ultimately our view of this particular ban will rest on how the slogan “globalise the intifada” is understood, and whether it amounts to hate speech and incitement or not. People will argue both sides and indeed have way before Wednesday’s news. New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, for example, has justified the words – but he has also said that it’s not language he’d use.
Index is in the market of words because words matter. Words can bring about positive change, which is why autocrats fear them and try to control them. They can also bring about harm. But proving when speech leads to harm is very difficult. In the end, we intend to see what the courts decide in this particular case before taking a final position.
Has the space for ambiguity around the words “globalise the intifada” lessened since Bondi? Perhaps. However, from Index’s viewpoint, the state – the police and the CPS – will need to demonstrate its case that these words are harmful in and of themselves. Where meaning is genuinely ambiguous, we always argue that the criminal law should tread carefully. Criminalisation should not be the default response to contested political speech. Slippery slopes are not mere abstractions.
There is another dimension too. When we at Index think about bans we don’t just think about whether they’re justified, we interrogate whether they’ll bring about the intended result. In this case the aim of a ban is said by the police chiefs to tackle antisemitism. It’s clearly a justifiable aim. But history does not offer encouragement that bans on speech reduce prejudice.
However, as Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to use the slogan implies, freedom of expression includes not only the right to speak but the responsibility to do so with care, especially in times as volatile as these. The right to say the words does not carry a compulsion to do so, particularly in circumstances where the consequences have been demonstrated. Words matter, yes. But lives – black, white, Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, non-Jew – matter more.
