So says AC Grayling over at Comment is Free. Professor Grayling, normally known as a quite strident critic of religion, points out that Articles 18 (which guarantees freedom of worship) and 19 (freedom of speech) of the UN Declaration on Human...
Memorial's historical archive must be restored immediately. An open letter from Orlando Figes and some of the world's leading academics Dmitrii Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko, Governor of St Petersburg Vladimir...
The treatment of Vittorio Filippis, former publisher of Libération, signals the deteriorating situation for the media in France. Natasha Lehrer reports A demonstration was held on 5 December outside Paris’s Palais de la Justice to protest against...
A Wikipedia page showing an image of an album cover by German heavy metal band The Scorpions has been blocked following allegations of potential illegality. The Internet Watch Foundation has said the image, which shows a naked pre-pubescent girl,...
Russian collective memory of the various catastrophes to which the country has been subjected during the last 100 years has long been extremely selective. While there are a huge number of grandiose memorials to those who died in the Second World...
The raid on a leading historical research centre in St Petersburg is an attack on freedom of expression, writes historian Orlando Figes Yesterday, on 3 December at 1 pm, a group of masked men from the Investigative Committee of the Russian General...
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on 2 December that Turkish Labour Party (EMEP) member Ahmet Gemici's right to freedom of expression was violated when the police seized copies of a party magazine whose distribution or sale had been...
This is a guest post by FCO whistleblower Derek Pasquill Like everyone else I was astonished by the arrest of Damian Green. I too was interrogated for the same number of hours in the same central London police station by the same type of special...
Eleven people were injured, two of them police, during a protest in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa last Thursday. The protesters were calling for a boycott of upcoming elections. Five were injured by police, and a further 18 arrested. Read more here
Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie marked a new era: a retreat from the ideal of tolerance and the spirit of the Enlightenment, says Bernard-Henri Lévy in this exclusive article from the new issue of Index on Censorship Twenty years...
Al Dostour editor Ibrahim Eissa has won the Gerbran Tueni award, a prize given by the World Association of Newspapers that honours an editor or publisher in the Arab region. Eissa spent much of the last year locked in legal battles after he was...
