CATEGORY: Magazine

The multipolar challenge to free expression

The multipolar challenge to free expression

by | 8 Jul 2013

Our special report explores dramatic shifts in the landscape of freedom of expression in recent years.
We are now living in a multipolar world, where emerging powers command considerable influence and where economics, politics and cultural expression are being redefined. The protection of free speech in one country may amount to criminal insult in another. Whether it’s religious offence, public order or online freedom, India, Brazil, the United States and Russia have vastly different approaches. How they position themselves on the international stage – and how they resolve matters when countries clash – could have enormous impact for the future of free expression.
Includes articles by: Guy Berger; John Sauven; Salil Tripathi; Frank La Rue; Ronald Deibert and more.

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Thatcher: Paradoxes of secrecy

Thatcher: Paradoxes of secrecy

by | 9 Apr 2013

In this Index on Censorship magazine article from 1988, Duncan Campbell claimed that former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died this week, was “utterly disdainful of press freedom and open government”

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Global view

Global view

by | 26 Mar 2013

Index CEO Kirsty Hughes looks at the current climate for free speech around the world, from press regulation in the UK to ongoing challenges to digital freedom

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The beast of fanaticism

The beast of fanaticism

by | 23 Mar 2013

Legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died yesterday aged 82. In 1981, he addressed a writers’ conference at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. Index on Censorship published this extraordinary speech the same year

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On the ground: Sao Paulo

On the ground: Sao Paulo

by | 20 Mar 2013

Free speech is enshrined in the constitution. But in reality, those with power and influence can stifle critical debate and reporting. It’s time to overhaul the system, says Rafael Spuldar

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A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

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.

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