From the magazine: Freedom of expression must trump the commitment to tiptoe around some people’s idea of multiculturalism, argues Samira Ahmed, looking back at the last 15 years
Defending the right to be offended
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Mission creep
Our special report explores the freedom to choose what we believe and how we practise our beliefs, and the counterbalancing freedom to discuss and question those beliefs.
Gender segregation is so last century
Why does it feel like England’s universities are swinging back in the wrong direction on gender equality? Rachael Jolley asks
Current issue: Mission creep — defending religious tolerance and free speech
The upcoming winter issue of Index on Censorship magazine includes a special report on religion and tolerance, with articles from around the world. Writers include the Bishop of Bradford, Salil Tripathi, Samira Ahmed and Kaya Genc. There's an...
Doris Lessing: Books for the hungry
“The most popular book everywhere is George Orwell’s Animal Farm”, Lessing writes from Zimbabwe in 1999
Cycles of revolution: Doris Lessing in China
In 1993, the novelist, who died on Sunday, reported for Index from a changing China
Tadeusz Mazowiecki: “there is nothing real about ‘realpolitik'”
Poland’s first non-Communist premier died today. In 1995, he spoke to Index on Censorship magazine about his decision to resign as Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights in former Yugoslavia
Sarah Brown: ‘If you can see it, you can be it’
The following speech by Sarah Brown, education campaigner for A World at School, was delivered at the launch event for the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine. I am delighted to be at Lilian Baylis Technology School – I went to school in...
Sarah Brown: “A girl with an education is the most terrifying force in the world”
World leaders need to deliver on their pledges to institute universal primary education — especially for girls — if the world wants to empower the next generation, campaigner Sarah Brown said in a speech at the launch of the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine on Tuesday.
Not heard?
Our special report explores the voices of those who are rarely heard and the countless reasons why those people are ignored, suppressed or actively censored, as well as the power of journalism to make those voices audible.
Includes articles by: Amartya Sen asks “what is press freedom good for?”; Johanna Schwartz and Fadimata Walet Oumar report on Mali’s censored musicians; Charlotte Cross and Banu Khetab ask if women are going to lose out in Afghanistan; Philip Pullman tells why authors must be paid.
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.