Jailed Tunisian dissident, writer and lawyer Mohamed Abbou was released from prison in Le Kef, where he had been held since his arrest in March 2005. He was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half years for exposing torture in Tunisian prisons on...
The daily risk of intimidation, murder and kidnap is well documented in Iraq. The scale of the country’s health and humanitarian crisis is less understood. Journalist, photographer and human rights activist Sajida al Ebadi, 32, from Basra in...
One of the most pernicious means by which restrictions on free speech have grown tighter in recent years has been through the use of incitement laws, both incitement to hatred and incitement to violence and murder. In some cases, as in the...
Getting 16-year-old Linda Playfoot to take her school to court for not letting her wear a ‘purity ring’ to classes was as clever a way of wrong-footing liberal folk as I’ve seen. Strict adherence to school uniforms is the sort of thing religious...
Salman Rushdie is back in the limelight in the Islamic world – this time as Sir Salman. His inclusion in the Queen’s birthday honours list this year has rekindled memories of 1988-89, when the publication of his controversial book The Satanic...
Anyone who believes in the rights to freedom of expression and information must welcome Gordon Brown’s promise of a more open government. An open government is one which hears the voices of its citizens - all its citizens - even when their demands...
I’ve got to admit I was thrilled when Alan told me he was thinking of putting in for the Gaza job. I’d left the Strip about a year earlier, and was missing it terribly. Alan is rightly described as a journalist’s journalist - and...
While British newspapers were harrumphing about the Australian government banning Aboriginals from accessing pornography, they signally failed to notice that one of the 19 new offences announced in New Labour’s 54th criminal justice bill since it...
Index takes a critical look at the health of free speech in the UK on New Labour’s tenth birthday in power. Has the UK become a less tolerant society?
The non-renewal of the licence of RCTV, Venezuela’s main private TV station, has been portrayed very differently depending on whom you ask. From the perspective of Chavez admirers it was a simple matter of putting some order in the airwave spectrum...
Freedom of expression in the United Kingdom is still defined negatively. The freedom not to be offended, abused, plagiarised or blasphemed against outweighs in most legislative terms the freedom to engage in any of these potentially enjoyable and...
Trying to remember when all this started, I rooted out from my shelves the other day a copy of a book I wrote as a young reporter on the Guardian. Its front cover is cracking and a bit faded with the passage of 27 years, but the cartoon by John...