9 Feb 2026 | Asia and Pacific, Australia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News, Palestine
Australia has been described as having some of the “democratic world’s most draconian anti-protest laws” after a state government invoked special powers ahead of the Israeli president’s visit on Monday.
On the first day of Herzog’s visit, there have been reports of police using pepper spray on protesters in Sydney, as hundreds tried to march despite protest restrictions, as well as in Victoria, where demonstrations were also held.
Nationwide demonstrations were set to take place against the five-day visit of Isaac Herzog, who a UN commission of enquiry found incited genocide against Palestinians, in what was described in the lead-up as the most potentially divisive state visit since the peak of the Vietnam War. [Editor’s note: the role of president in Israel is largely ceremonial and executive power is vested in the Cabinet and the Prime Minister.] The demonstrations come after Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese invited Herzog to visit, following December’s terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, during which two gunmen killed 15 people and injured 40.
To “help manage the visit safely and responsibly”, the New South Wales (NSW) government declared Herzog’s visit a major event under the Major Events Act 2009, it announced over the weekend. The declaration is usually reserved for sporting events.
On Monday afternoon Sydney time, the Palestine Action Group lost a court challenge against the special powers given to NSW police by the state government.
The extra powers allow police to order people to move on, shut certain locations and give lawful directions to prevent disruption or risk to public safety. They insisted they didn’t ban protests or marches and people could still “retain the right to express their views lawfully”. But anyone who fails to comply risks a fine of up to $5,500 or exclusion from the major event area.
Greg Barns, spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA), a not-for-profit national association of lawyers, academics and other professionals, told Index that governments in Australia had legislation allowing police to regulate protest activities which “ostensibly” seek to balance freedom of speech with community safety.
“It is highly unusual to prevent protests, or severely restrict their scope when a foreign leader visits Australia,” he said. “Famously in the 1960s there were large protests in Sydney against US President Lyndon Johnson.”
He added that because Australia didn’t protect freedom of speech in its constitution, it was easier for governments to pass legislation prohibiting protests.
According to news reports, police ordered an issue to a man in Bondi to move on, after he climbed onto an electrical box and screamed at Herzog’s motorcade. He complied with the direction. Police said two others displaying placards in Bondi were given move on orders under the Summary Offences Act, which they also obeyed.
Professor Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter terrorism, said on X on Monday: “Australia now has some of the democratic world’s most draconian anti-protest laws. Today a man was arrested as an ‘agitator’ simply for peacefully yelling ‘shame’ in the direction of the visiting Israeli President, on the basis it may have ‘incited’ fear”.”
Meanwhile NSW premier Chris Minns said: “This is about keeping people safe, lowering the temperature and ensuring Sydney remains calm and orderly.”
Palestine Action Group Sydney accused Minns of a “scare campaign” and said on their Facebook page that it was “absolutely lawful” for people to gather to protest, as they encouraged protesters to gather at Sydney’s Town Hall for a march.
“The streets of Sydney belong to the people, not to the head of a genocidal state,” they said.
Just a week after the Bondi attack, NSW Parliament passed The Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, which allows the state’s police commissioner or deputy commissioner with the police minister to restrict authorised assemblies in specific areas for 14 days after a terrorism declaration.
“This is designed to deter divisive, inflammatory public assemblies which put community safety and cohesion at risk in the immediate aftermath of an attack,” the NSW government said on 24 December.
After a declaration, no public assemblies are allowed in designated areas. Police can move people on if their behaviour or presence obstructs traffic or causes fear, harassment or intimidation, they said.
The notice can be extended by two-week periods for up to three months. It does not prevent quiet reflection, prayer or peaceful gatherings, the government said. However, a video has emerged of police seemingly dispersing Muslims praying during the protests.
In early February, the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration (PARD) was extended for two weeks until 17 February, restricting public assemblies in Sydney’s eastern suburbs area, which includes Bondi, and parts of the city.
Critics of the law including Greens MPs have described Minns as pro-Israel and said that it was clear he was targeting pro-Palestine protesters, including those opposing Herzog’s visit, with the moves.
An NSW parliamentary review into hate speech has also recommended the state government introduce legislation banning the phrase “globalise the intifada”.
With several days of Herzog’s visit left, it remains to be seen whether those opposing the Israeli president’s visit will have the opportunity to raise their voices, and whether they can do so safely.
11 Dec 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Australia, News
Read Index’s statement on why Australia’s ban on social media for under 16s is disproportionate
When Australia passed a world-first social media ban for teens, there was a display of national pride from the prime minister, and even the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in the country’s national colours, green and gold, to celebrate the historic achievement.
The law, which came into effect on 10 December, requires 10 platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from having accounts on their platforms, or risk fines of up to $49.5 million.
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 had bipartisan support and sailed through Australian parliament last December. Seventy per cent of Australians are said to support it.
Australia is being feted. The EU, Malaysia, and others are said to be watching, including the UK, although the culture secretary has expressed doubts over whether it could be enforced in the country.
But a barrage of human rights groups and others, including Index on Censorship, Amnesty International and Save the Children, have all criticised or opposed the ban.
Tom Sulston, head of policy at Australian charity Digital Rights Watch, told Index that they were broadly supportive of the idea that internet access is a human right. While the new law only restricts teens from accessing 10 specific sites – X, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch – he said that the space these social media companies represent is enormous.
“They do occupy this space as the town square of digital society,” Sulston said. “So, is it proportionate to remove that right of access to a group of people in order to protect their safety, or under the guise of protecting their safety? We don’t think so.”
He added that there were alternative measures that many organisations were asking for, such as regulation and investment in digital literacy, which could have been put in place instead of an outright ban.
There is now an interesting legal conversation to be had about the ban, Sulston said. On 26 November, two 15-year-olds launched a legal challenge to the law, supported by rights group the Digital Freedom Project (DFP), in Australia’s High Court. They are arguing that all Australians have a constitutional implied right to freedom of political communication.
“Young people like me are the voters of tomorrow,” said one plaintiff Macy Neyland in a statement. “Why on earth should we be banned from expressing our views?” Neyland added that the situation was “like Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four”.
Noah Jones, who is also suing the government, told the media: “We’re disappointed in a lazy government that blanket-bans under-16s rather than investing in programmes to help kids be safe on social media. They should protect kids with safeguards, not silence.”
A direction hearing for the teens’ court challenge will be heard in February at the earliest.
Digital Freedom Project president John Ruddick, who is also a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council with the Libertarian Party, has branded the ban the world’s most draconian legislation. He said that it was “as Big Brother as you can get” and that “even the Chinese Communist Party would be drooling over this”.
Reddit was also reportedly looking at legal action, but has confirmed it will comply with the restrictions.
In submissions to Australia’s Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications last November, before it became law, the Australian Human Rights Commission said that it had “serious reservations” about the legislation. While it said that it understood the significance of protecting young people from online harm and the negative consequences of social media, the ban would affect some human rights outlined in international human rights treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
These include the right to freedom of expression and information, and the freedom of association and peaceful assembly, as contained in both treaties.
Digital Rights Watch’s Sulston said that he was also worried about autocracies eyeing up the law. According to digital rights non-profit Access Now, 2024 was the worst year on record for internet shutdowns.
“Young people are not represented democratically, even in democratic societies. If you’re under the age to vote, then you get nothing,” Sulston said. “So being able to organise and develop political understanding and take political action online is really important for that cohort. You can see why it would be very attractive for authoritarian regimes to clamp down on that.”
But Sulston said that even though he considered the law a “disaster” and there was no evidence that it would improve children’s lives, it had already been showcased at the UN General Assembly and “deemed a great success”.
He said: “It’s really hard to see what a path to change looks like, because no matter how harmful it is, it seems we’re stuck with it.”
Read Index’s statement on why Australia’s ban on social media for under 16s is disproportionate
10 Dec 2025 | Digital rights, News
Enacted today, Australia’s ban of selected social media platforms for under 16-year-olds is the most sweeping attempt carried out by a democratic state to address online harms facing young people. While we acknowledge the need to ensure young people are protected from inappropriate content and are supported in how they engage with information and content shared online, this approach raises a number of significant issues.
Any such ban on platforms curtails the user’s ability to navigate the open web and access public-interest information. As a result, it is a disproportionate threat to free expression as outlined in Australian and international law. It could also hinder young peoples’ ability to navigate these online spaces when they do come of age. This was outlined by James Ball after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act’s child protection provisions in July 2025: “If we try to keep young people away from it, they will be woefully underskilled, undersocialised, and unprepared for the world they’ll first encounter as 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds,” he wrote.
The realities of social media mean that the very platforms that give access to inappropriate content also give access to a wider range of content that undoubtedly benefits society. Whether that is public-interest reporting, testimony from those living in authoritarian regimes where state control over conventional media outlets leaves online platforms as the sole route available to access international audiences, or a space for marginalised users to find communities outside their direct environment, social media bans do not attempt to differentiate between the good and the bad. They simply cut young people off from all content hosted or shared on that platform, without giving them the tools or support they need to be able to differentiate, interrogate or navigate this complex but important information ecosystem.
For too long, free expression has been presented as an opposition or explicit threat to young people, with few meaningful conversations about how young people can be supported to access their rights. But young people have free expression rights, alongside a wide range of other human rights. These rights are not only available to them once they turn 16. For instance, Article 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that “[t]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” As in broader international law, this is not an absolute right and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child also acknowledges the need of “special safeguards” for children. However, social media bans for every young person with no way for them to consent to or challenge the law does little to give the child a choice as to the media they can use. In fact, the choice is made on their behalf.
Specific provisions in the Australian law also raise a number of significant questions that, while too early to track in terms of implementation, should be considered. Australia’s social media ban only covers a specific number of platforms, leaving several outside the law’s scope. This is inconsistent. For example, Facebook and Instagram are included, but Messenger and WhatsApp (other platforms owned by Meta) are not. While this will increase the complexity for big platforms to differentiate its access requirements across the different services it provides, it also establishes spaces where young people can turn to to avoid age checks. This could encourage bad faith actors to target their actions towards these unregulated areas in a more concerted and impactful manner. Users who are now unable to access the platforms on which they have established communities will be susceptible to such exploitation, with few avenues of recourse or support.
Any policy of this type requires the significant deployment of untested for-profit tools to ensure young people cannot access the platforms included in the law. With many of these tools, users are required to upload sensitive documents such as a passport or bank card to platforms, or consent to face scanning, run by untested and opaque third-party providers. In many cases, users will not be able to choose different methods or vendors and so will be forced to trust these providers with their sensitive data. This is not without risk. Last month, “68,000 Australian Discord users had their personal information compromised” through a tool the platform used as part of its age assurance checks. The compromised data included “government ID images, names, usernames, email addresses, and some limited billing information”.
Requiring users, including young people over the age of 16 in the case of Australia, to blindly trust such platforms, with limited forms of choice or accountability may require them to choose free expression rights over the rights of privacy. But you cannot have one without the other. Without a private space to call their own or the ability to actively choose what data they share, users may curtail their involvement in online discourse, thus undermining their rights to free expression beyond the objectives of this law. As outlined by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the social media ban “normalises broad-based age checks – whether through ID verification or invisible profiling – and creates vast new datasets about how we live and interact, all just to prove we’re old enough to be on social media.” In an age of rampant digital surveillance carried out by private opaque platforms, whose decisions are informed by profit not rights, we should be cautious as to what data we require to be shared. The development of AI age inference tools raises further fears, especially considering academic studies have monitored “higher false positive rate … for certain groups compared to others” and “that minors from East and West Africa were misclassified as older than they were compared to minors of the same age from the other regions”.
We are concerned that outright bans, like the type enacted in Australia, are presented as a silver bullet to protect young people against inappropriate content. This risks closing the door to a more nuanced and proportionate response that centres young people and incorporates a society-wide approach including anti-monopoly and algorithmic transparency measures, improved educational support, information literacy initiatives, sustainable media funding, the development of young person-specific and young person-created media content, or a more participatory strategy across government and society.
As other countries and bodies, including the European Parliament and the UK, are monitoring Australia’s laws, with many policy-makers calling for the policy to be emulated, we urge extreme caution. One day is wholly insufficient to gauge the impact on young people and we must avoid knee-jerk measures for such an important and complex issue. Bans are seldom the answer to the challenging issues of our time. We owe it to young people to approach this issue with the care, complexity, nuance and depth it requires.
11 Apr 2025 | Asia and Pacific, China, News, Statements
The undersigned organisations condemn the harassment of artist, political cartoonist and activist Badiucao, which has taken place via email, in the media, and on social media in the last week. The harassment began as Badiucao was preparing to publish a statement criticising the human rights situation in Hong Kong. The statement was providing context to his artwork – a short video – that was being exhibited in the city. Like much of Badiucao’s work, the video sought to champion the right to freedom of expression and challenge authoritarianism.
Badiucao was one of more than a dozen artists featured in the three-minute video compilation put together by the Milan-based digital gallery, Art Innovation, on billboards during the Art Basel fair in Hong Kong last week. The 4-second clip, entitled “Here and Now”, showed Badiucao silently mouthing the words “you must take part in revolution” – the title of his newly-published graphic novel and a Mao Zedong quote. It was broadcast hourly between 28 March and 2 April.
On 1 April, Badiucao contacted several media organisations to let them know he would be publishing a statement about the artwork later that evening. Some of them then contacted Art Innovation for comment. Shortly thereafter, Badiucao received an email from the gallery warning him not to publish his statement. They told him that legal action would “definitely” follow if content “against the Chinese government is published”. The gallery later responded to media requests saying that the exhibition “had nothing to do with political messages”.
Badiucao went on to publish his statement. In it, he said: “This art action underscores the absurdity of Hong Kong’s current civil liberties and legal environment. And it would remind everyone that art is dead when it offers no meaning.” The exhibition was removed from the billboards the following morning, despite having been scheduled to be displayed until 3 April.
In a second email to Badiucao, Art Innovation said that his actions had already resulted in financial implications, as well as legal actions, “which will be directed against you”. They demanded that he immediately remove all posts from his personal social media accounts related to the exhibition and claimed that failure to comply could “result in further legal consequences”. They said their lawyers were already working to “initiate appropriate legal action” against him.
On 3 April, Art Innovation publicly accused Badiucao of having provided them with false information and of having violated the contract he signed by submitting political content. “[W]e can consider it a crime,” they wrote on social media. Badiucao said he had submitted the artwork under the pseudonym Andy Chou because the video clip was to be shown in Hong Kong, where the authorities had previously shut down his exhibition. He said he never concealed his identity from the gallery and that they knew that he was behind the artwork.
Art Innovation would also have been aware of the distinctly political nature of Badiucao’s artwork given that they first contacted him via social media, where he regularly shares his artwork with his more than 100k followers, in 2022. They invited him to collaborate on a billboard exhibition during Art Basel in Miami that year, to which he contributed a satirical image of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
“We are appalled at the behaviour of this Italian gallery, which claims to ‘love everything that is outside the rules’ and ‘love the freedom of artists’ and yet harasses and tries to silence an artist that stands for exactly those principles,” the undersigned organisations said. “Badiucao must be applauded for his efforts to creatively challenge censorship and authoritarianism in such a repressive regime. Art Innovation should immediately withdraw their legal threats, issue a public apology to Badiucao, and refrain from further harassment of the artist.”
Signed:
Index on Censorship
Alliance for Citizens Rights
Art for Human Rights
ARTICLE 19
Australian Cartoonists Association
Australia Hong Kong Link
Befria Hongkong
Blueprint for Free speech
Civil Liberties Union for Europe
Cartooning for Peace
Cartoonists Rights Network International
The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation
DOX Centre for Contemporary Art
European Federation of Journalists
Foundation Atelier for Community Transformation ACT
Freemuse
Freedom Cartoonists
Freiheit für Hongkong
Hong Kong Committee in Norway
Hong Kong Forum, Los Angeles
Hong Kong Watch (HKW)
Hongkongers in Britain (HKB)
Hong Kongers in San Diego
Hong Kongers in San Francisco Bay Area
Human Rights in China (HRIC)
Human Rights Foundation (HRF)
Humanitarian China
IFEX
Lady Liberty Hong Kong
NGO DEI
NY4HK
Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT)
Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND)
Trade Union of Croatian Journalists
PEN America
PEN International
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Richardson Institute – Lancaster University
The Rights Practice
Safeguard Defenders
StraLi for Strategic Litigation
Stand with Hong Kong EU
Toronto Association for Democracy in China 多倫多支聯會
Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP)
Washingtonians Supporting Hong Kong (DC4HK)
Notes:
- The day after Badiucao published his statement, Hong Kong’s new chief of police warned that, despite Hong Kong’s return to stability following the 2019-20 protests, there continued to be “soft resistance” to the regime through arts and culture. He did not name Badiucao or Art Innovation specifically.
- On 8 April, the South China Morning Post reported that Hong Kong’s Culture, Sports, and Tourism Bureau had confirmed that they had not requested the removal of the video.
- The Security Bureau of the Hong Kong government had told South China Morning Post that: “[The] freedom of literary and artistic creation and other cultural activities are protected by law. As long as they do not violate the law, the above-mentioned freedoms will not be restricted.”
