27 Feb 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Russia
“Dear Alexei, it’s been a year that darkness has fallen upon us – and yet, your ideas and your determination give us strength,” read a letter placed on opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s grave on 16 February 2025, marking the one-year anniversary of his death.
That day, more than 5,300 people attended the Borisovskoye Cemetery in Moscow where he is buried, according to the Beliy Schetchik (White Counter) movement. Despite temperatures reportedly dropping to a frosty -8 degrees Celsius, Navalny supporters waited in line outside the cemetery to pay their respects.
Artist and musician Yaroslav Smolev was one of the attendees. He told Index: “By joining in, not only did we get a chance to feel that we’re among like-minded people, but we also showed the [rest of the] Russian society what matters to us.”
In the days following Navalny’s death last year, Smolev spoke to Index for the first time. He had been arrested for staging a solo protest in support of the opposition leader in the centre of St Petersburg. Around that time, hundreds of mourners were being detained across the country, namely for laying flowers at improvised memorials.
Even so, people have returned to these locations this year to honour Navalny’s memory – and were predictably punished. According to the rights group OVD-Info, on the anniversary of Navalny’s death, at least 26 people were detained. In the city of Volgograd, for example, Alexander Yefimov from the Yabloko opposition party was jailed for 14 days for bringing flowers and a photo of Navalny to a memorial and placing them at a monument dedicated to victims of Soviet-era repression.
Carrying portraits of Putin’s main opponent – and even signs with his name on – became illegal after Navalny and his movement were declared “extremist” in 2021 and 2022.
For Smolev, Navalny is a role model who enabled him to overcome his fears. “He spoke with police officers in a natural and straightforward manner,” Smolev said. “There was not even a hint of fear in his behavior.” Smolev stressed that if it weren’t for Navalny, he would have never joined many peaceful protests, starting in 2017.
He added that if Navalny hadn’t gone as far as sacrificing his life “for his values and his ideals”, “the general public might not have realised that his lifelong battle was, in fact, heartfelt”. He was alluding to Navalny’s return to Russia in 2021 from Germany after recovering from a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
For Nadezhda Skochilenko – the mother of former Russian political prisoner and Index award winner Aleksandra Skochilenko – Navalny’s death caused “much pain”. Above all, she told Index, she thinks of him as “the son of his mother”, Lyudmila Navalnaya.
When Navalny died, Aleksandra was in jail. She had been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages. She was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange last summer.
Asked if the news of Navalny’s death increased her fear for the safety of political prisoners like her daughter, Nadezhda responded: “I’m too well-informed about what’s going on [in Russian] prisons. I’m frightened for everyone [who’s incarcerated] from the moment they’re arrested.”
She said that people die in jails, in pre-trial detention, and even during arrest. In 2024, eight political prisoners perished; one of them was pianist Pavel Kushnir, who spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Over the past year, the pressure on political prisoners has increased, Nadezhda said. They are placed in solitary confinement “more frequently and for longer periods of time”. In these tiny punishment cells, people are not allowed to lie down during the day, among other restrictions.
To make matters worse, in many cases, proper medical treatment is not provided to political prisoners – a fact that “the authorities no longer try to conceal”, Nadezhda said. She is also concerned that minors accused of “terrorism” in politically-motivated cases are placed in pre-trial detention, instead of on house arrest.
She added that “on a regular basis” dissidents are denied access to letters sent by their supporters. Nevertheless, people keep writing to them – “the most useful and safest act [of resistance] within reach of everyone”, according to Smolev.
Despite the pressure of the authorities, supporters and families of jailed dissidents battle with prison administrations over human rights abuses. They also attend court hearings when they can – while some are still open to the public, many political trials are now closed, especially the ones of dissidents charged with treason, Nadezhda explained.
But acts of resistance “cannot be entirely suppressed”, she said – “hence “[Putin’s] regime responds with even more severe crackdown on dissent”.
25 Feb 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Australia, News
Petrina Harley likens direct action to giving birth.
“My body knew it had a job to do, so I got on and focused on my inner strength,” the 53-year-old mother of two told Index via phone from Perth. “I find it really empowering.”
Harley is a climate activist of eight years facing trial in June for repeatedly blocking entry to Australia’s biggest gas hub to be built in a decade, a AU$16.5 billion ($10.35 billion) project in the Pilbara on the Burrup Peninsula of Western Australia (WA) by sector giant Woodside.
It may come as a surprise to some, but not to Harley, that new research from the University of Bristol released in December showed that Australia is now the world’s top country for arresting climate and environmental protesters.
“I’ve been arrested four times now,” said Harley. Alarmingly, arrest is now a common response in 20% of all climate and environmental protests in Australia, with the international average being 6.3%.
This is also part of a broader crackdown in the country, where new measures in the state of Victoria purportedly aimed at tackling recent cases of anti-Semitism could be used to target climate protesters, human rights lawyers have now warned.
There’s particular concern that a potential ban on “lock on” devices such as glue, chains or locks, could be used to take aim at environmental campaigners. Similar laws have been announced in New South Wales (NSW).
“The arrests [in Australia] are one dimension of criminalisation,” said Oscar Berglund, senior lecturer in International Public and Social Policy in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol.
“There have also been multiple new anti-protest laws passed. What we are seeing currently is an intensifying criminalisation of protest in both democratic countries and less democratic countries.”
Harley, who began protesting after she had children, said that she had tried “everything under the sun” including running for the Senate in the lower house with the Socialist Alliance party, holding weekly stalls in town and gathering petitions, before she took part in two blockades in WA.
In the first one, in November 2021, Harley and another Scarborough Gas Action Alliance activist, Elizabeth Burrow, used a caravan to obstruct entry to the Woodside project. The activists bonded their arms into a concrete drum inside the vehicle. Harley was “locked on” for 16 hours. When she refused to move, she was arrested in the caravan and after being taken to hospital for injuries locked up overnight and charged. Harley said it was “complete overreach” by police.
The pair pleaded not guilty and used an emergency defence – normally reserved for cases like murder – arguing that the activities of Woodside are directly putting lives at risk. In 2023 they were found guilty by a magistrate’s court in Karratha in the Pilbara region of failing to obey an order given by an officer, obstructing public officers, and unreasonably obstructing or preventing the free passage on a path or carriageway.
They received a six-month community-based order, with a requirement to complete 100 hours of community service and were also handed a $600 fine each. Police initially sought more than $33,000 in compensation from the activists for removing them from the caravan, but this application was later dismissed.
Last July, Harley and another activist, Emma, a high school student, used a car and a boat to block the only access road to the same project, in a bid to stop its operations. Harley was “locked on” for 12 hours. She is now facing three obstruction charges over this.
At her trial in Perth in June, she will again plead not guilty using the extraordinary emergency defence.
“I’m very excited, I’ve got a really ethical lawyer who’s keen to test the case because it would be a precedent,” Harley said. “People have tried it before, but no one’s actually won. I’ve got some very high-profile witnesses to testify.”
David Mejia-Canales is a Sydney-based senior human rights lawyer at Australian group Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC). He said that an analysis of two decades’ worth of anti-protest legislation in Australia from 2003 onwards found that out of 49 pieces of legislation introduced, most target environmental protesters in the streets, at mines or logging sites. But laws are broad and vague despite peaceful protest being protected under international law.
“In Australia you just have to look out the window to notice that the climate crisis is getting worse and the thing that our governments are appearing to do is to jail climate protesters instead of actually doing anything that is meaningful and quick and long lasting about this,” said Mejia-Canales.
He said HRLC wasn’t aware of any activists in Australia who have been acquitted on an emergency defence. But framing the necessity defence (breaking the law to prevent greater harm) as an “extraordinary emergency defence” could allow protesters to use the growing acceptance of climate change as an emergency that requires urgent attention, he said.
However, just last week a climate activist in Melbourne was told that he cannot rely on evidence from climate experts following charges relating to an Extinction Rebellion protest.
Mejia-Canales said that Australia urgently needs a Human Rights Act, which could be crucial for climate activists, reinforcing arguments that their actions seek to uphold fundamental rights rather than merely disrupt public order.
A WA government spokesperson told Index: “Everyone is entitled to protest peacefully in WA, however police will respond to violent or threatening behaviour.”
Index approached the minister for climate change and energy for comment, but did not receive a reply.
Woodside said that it supported respectful debate. But it said acts intended to threaten, harm, intimidate or disrupt employees, their families or any other member of the community going about their daily lives “should be met with the full force of the law”.
Read more: UK journalists fall victim to new police tactics
24 Feb 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine, United States
The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s propaganda machine.
Among these were that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, and that Zelenskyy’s approval rating in Ukraine has plummeted to 4%, all of which closely mirror the Kremlin’s narrative. In response, Zelenskyy said that the US president is “trapped” within a Russian “disinformation bubble”.
Trump’s comments have been debunked by many world leaders, including Keir Starmer, who immediately came out in support of Zelenskyy as a democratically elected leader, and asserted that it is normal for presidential elections to be suspended during wartime (as happened in the UK during World War Two).
This exchange indicates a drastic reshaping in the geopolitical relationship between the USA and Russia, and indeed the USA and its key allies – but it also indicates a worrying affront to access to truthful information, the normalisation of false realities, and an acceptance of the suppression of free speech.
In what is often deemed Putin’s “war on truth”, the autocratic leader’s regime is notorious for crackdowns on journalism and free information. As well as blocking access to almost all social media websites and international news sites in Russia, his government has banned independent news outlets, with media now under government control. In doing so, he has been able to control the narrative of the war for his own citizens.
This is not to say that Ukraine itself has been a bastion of free expression. As reported by Amnesty International, free speech restrictions in the country have increased since 2022, with 2,000 cases of individuals being charged, prosecuted or investigated for crimes such as “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine”, including those who class themselves as pacifists.
But what Trump’s words do signal is a terrifying new world order where intentional mistruths are prioritised over fair, free and accurate information, not only by dictators, but by leaders who are meant to be upholding the principles of democracy.
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, former US president Barack Obama delivered a speech at Stanford University about the growing propagation of disinformation, and how it could endanger democracy. Autocratic leaders, such as Putin, have weaponised the power of the internet to obfuscate the truth and confuse the global public, he said. “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Three years later, and we’re seeing this play out in real time, with the help of the current president of the USA. The sewage is spilling across the world, muddying the waters, and it will have global ramifications on what people believe to be undisputed fact.
21 Feb 2025 | News, United Kingdom
In a recent article in Byline Times, Neal Lawson the executive director of Compass, a “good society” cross-party campaign group, asked why the UK government couldn’t just ban lying in politics. This followed a recent commitment by the Welsh Senedd to do just that, before elections in 2026.
Whether it’s Donald Trump in the USA, or Reform party candidates in the UK, right-wing and far-right politicians have been responsible for a surging problem of online disinformation that deepens societal divisions and spreads distrust, in service of their political goals. As an academic expert on information warfare and propaganda, whose parliamentary evidence submissions played a central role alongside journalists and whistleblowers in 2018 in exposing the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal, I too would be happy if politicians would just stop lying. But a ban like this is not the solution – below are my five reasons why.
Difficulties of enforcement
A ban on lying would be difficult to enforce, after all, who would decide what exactly “truth” is, or which “untruth” was deliberate? Whoever has this role would hold far too great a power over political speech. Deciding “truth” could rely on public fact-checkers – but while excellent, these are not infallible. Although some researchers are trying, the intent to deceive is notoriously difficult to reliably and consistently infer.
Implications for speech and abuse
Should the UK parliament implement such a ban, then the threat of being removed from office, barred from re-standing, or convicted of a new criminal offence of deception could result in good politicians becoming overly cautious and policing their own speech. Right now, more than ever, the public needs to see brave and bold politicians who speak their minds in the face of authoritarian arguments, lies and corruption. Such sanctions could create a pressure that is similar to the one that makes a well-meaning press fearful of libel laws and SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) – these are weaponised by authoritarians and corrupt oligarchs to silence criticism. Banning lying in parliament could just as easily be abused by any future government in order to censor.
Parliament’s role in public debate
Flawed as it may be, in a democracy we work out our issues through public discourse, with a key role played by the media and an adversarial system of parliamentary politics.
Parliament is a forum in which, through evidence and protected speech, voters not only see political issues and policy debated, but also witness the exposure of deceptive politicians bearing bad policies, who they then have the power to vote out. While politicians frequently fail to live up to this ideal, they still play a key role in exposing and challenging the motives of their opponents.
We might not like politicians lying, but stopping lies in parliament won’t stop them elsewhere. We need wannabe demagogues to be able to lie in parliament – in order for these lies to be demolished in public view, through intelligent and compelling argument. We need leaders who model how people can challenge these arguments. This leads and shapes UK political culture and is surely what democracy needs right now. It shows the public the worst and best of what our politicians represent and the capacity to do this builds trust in democratic processes.
Importantly, it also focuses the media on parliament as the centre of political life and shows that politicians are responding to and explaining their position on debates that – like it or not – voters are seeing anyway in the media they consume.
Do we really want politicians to hide behind rhetoric and sleight of hand in parliament, while lies are fed copiously through the media, online campaigns and influencers? Forcing lies out of parliament would disengage parliament from taking on debates in British communities they need to meet head on. The resulting disengagement could change the role politicians play in wider British political life and increase perceptions of their irrelevance and elitism.
Increased media toxicity and polarisation
While politicians themselves may be neutered in the Commons, this won’t stop them and their parties feeding the toxic online discourse. It is a bad idea to leave the dismantling of political lies to journalists alone, given the current financial threats to journalism and growing dominance of social media as a provider of political information.
If populist politicians lie in parliament and face sanctions, they will embrace the opportunity to portray themselves as “martyrs”, suffering “censorship”. They will exploit this in the manner that we have seen modelled in the USA by President Trump and his supporters. Ironically, this could degrade trust in the very institutions of democracy that policymakers are trying to protect.
The colleagues of sanctioned politicians would join in their rallying cry, referring to banned speech, and indeed opinions of parliamentary censorship could hardly be labelled as disinformation – since censorship of a kind would truthfully have occurred.
This would give substantial power to small populist parties to hijack political debate both within parliament over the issue of censorship and beyond it. “Approved” political debate would be portrayed as “elite controlled”. And the implications for public trust in political process would be profound.
This could drive an even more toxic media and online environment than the one we are already facing. Research shows that most people don’t share falsehoods – this behaviour is a feature of declining trust in political systems, and resonance with underlying identities and belief systems. As the public lose faith in parliament, they would be targeted by alternative outlets and social media influencers branded as “uncensored” who push anti-government conspiracy theories while saying they present “evidence” that reveals democratic institutions as corrupt and the system as “rigged”.
Furthermore, a move of this kind could cause others to drop their guard. Importantly, the easily disprovable outright lies a ban might be narrowly applied to, are not the only or even the main way to mislead and manipulate people in politics. After President Trump’s inauguration, much of the US media were too cowardly to describe what most recognised as a Nazi salute by Elon Musk, with the Washington Post referring instead to a “straight-arm gesture”. As with this example, words can be technically accurate while denying an important truth. Building a misleading sense that parliamentary discourse is now de facto trustworthy among voters could reduce necessary scrutiny, scepticism and critical engagement among some voters.
Potentially, this could reinforce polarisation of British society, as urban, educated, middle class, educated voters’ faith in the system is confirmed, while others retreat further from trust in the political system. It fails to deal with the wider problem of propaganda outside parliament for which governments, politicians and private industries share responsibility. Banning lies is a simplistic solution that will miss the majority of attempts to hoodwink, manipulate and deceive voters with propaganda. It doesn’t address the Big Tech coup against our online environment or problems in journalism.
Banning lies attempts to solve the wrong problem
There is an important flaw underlying the logic of a ban on lying. It rests on the assumption that the problem at hand is simply the presence of falsehoods. Politicians have always lied. What this ban fails to consider is the fact that often people are voting for authoritarians or sharing lies in spite of knowing they are false or misleading. In the USA case, the problem isn’t necessarily that all Trump voters believe everything he says is factual. Some Trump voters like the lying, care more about “authenticity” or feel that, while inaccurate, the “gist” of his claims articulates a deeper cultural truth.
Muting obvious falsehoods within parliament would give the pretence of increased democratic norms and civility, but lies will continue online and it won’t stop the larger cultural narratives within which these lies are implicitly expressed by politicians. Banning lying in parliament would not stop upcoming demagogues deceiving or sharing a brutal, racist, fascist ideology. It will just make it harder for politicians to directly call out and counter the implicit deceptions that remain unspoken within their colleague’s argument.
People reveal their true selves in their deception and the public need to see them do it. Today we are fighting an ideology of fascism, not simply “lies”. This is why we need a bigger discussion about challenging propaganda, fighting fascism and reforming our communication system – not just silencing the most obvious and easily disproven lies expressed within parliament and providing more fuel for the conspiracy machine.
