21 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United Kingdom
On Saturday 17 May, veteran human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was arrested. Tatchell is no stranger to arrest. When he celebrated his 70th birthday in January 2022, his post marking the occasion said he’d been arrested 100 times. At the end of that year he added another one to the list, this time in Qatar, where he was protesting the country’s criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people ahead of the World Cup. That arrest wasn’t exactly surprising. Qatar doesn’t tolerate protest, much as it doesn’t tolerate gay people.
But Saturday’s arrest was different. Tatchell was detained in central London while peacefully partaking in a large-scale pro-Palestine march. Another twist: Tatchell believes he was reported to the police by the protest organisers themselves because his message called out Hamas, as well as the Israeli government. He was carrying a placard that read: “STOP Israel genocide! STOP Hamas executions! Odai Al-Rubai, aged 22, executed by Hamas! RIP!” The police also said Palestine march stewards told them he shouted “Hamas are terrorists”, which he firmly denies.
Let’s pause here for a moment. For the past two months protests have been taking place in Gaza against Hamas. In response, Hamas has reportedly issued orders via one of its Telegram channels for the execution of all “traitors and troublemakers”. Odai Al-Rubai was one of them. According to his family he was brutally beaten and his lifeless body dumped outside his home with the message: “This is what happens to people who criticise Hamas.” According to Tatchell, who wrote a blog post on his website in response to Saturday’s arrest, others have suffered a similar fate.
Tatchell’s point was simple: if you care about Palestinian lives, you should care about all the forces threatening them – including Hamas. For that, he says, he was told by a small minority of protesters at the start of the march to “fuck off”, “get out of here” and called “Zionist scum” (the police incidentally did nothing) before being reported on and taken away.
The idea that calling out Hamas somehow makes you an enemy of the Palestinian cause is bonkers, frankly. And yet this idea has taken hold. I’ve experienced this myself. In the past 19 months I’ve frequently criticised Israel for its attacks on freedom of expression (and human rights more broadly). But the moment I mention Hamas, the tone shifts. Eyes roll. The atmosphere chills. It’s not just that people seem uncomfortable with the idea of pulling up anyone from Gaza, there’s a suggestion there too: “well, you would say that – you’re Jewish”.
For me the response has been frustrating – if we’re talking about freedom of expression violations we have to be consistent. Hamas isn’t exempt. Eye roll all you want; for others though, the treatment has been far worse. Add to the Tatchell example these: A recent report looking at the state of freedom of expression in the UK arts sector detailed how an artist was bullied out of a collective for criticising Hamas; Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan peace activist living in the USA, is relentlessly targeted online — including with death threats — for condemning the group.
Such division, and the inconsistency in approach, is deeply unhelpful. At Index on Censorship we frequently defend the right of peaceful pro-Palestinian voices to be heard because they absolutely have experienced significant silencing – around the world, including in the UK – and that is wrong. Now some within those same spaces are turning on others. It’s a textbook case of free speech for me, not for thee – and it too is wrong.
That the police complied might also look like an anomaly. In truth, it was the result of several disturbing patterns converging. Tatchell was arrested at a protest, and whilst standing in a designated area, something he was forced to point out to the police. Stories like this are fairly par for the course with UK demonstrations these days since the last government pushed through sweeping anti-protest laws. In one of the most stark signs of police overreach, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos was questioned earlier this year under caution by police in connection to his peaceful involvement in a pro-Palestine demonstration in January.
In many of these cases, the police don’t seem to be exercising much judgment. With Tatchell, they acted on a report and arrested a protester whose placard was critical, not hateful. He was accused of “racially and religiously aggravated breach of the peace”, and of being part of a counter-protest movement. Perhaps they saw the word Hamas and jumped to the conclusion that he was promoting the group? Perhaps they didn’t read his words before it accusing Israel of genocide? Perhaps they didn’t see his “Free Palestine” badge?
Whatever the reason, it’s lazy work. The police appear to be acting more like blunt algorithms than sentient beings, and it’s not unique to Tatchell. As The Economist warned in its latest issue, police in Britain are arresting 30 people per day for speech online, double the 2017 rate. Some are for serious crimes, while others are for posts that people have found offensive, which fall short of the threshold of being a crime.
So his arrest wasn’t surprising. But it was, and is, deeply worrying. And it was a reminder of several important things, one being that the UK’s draconian protest laws need to go. Several organisations are fighting the new legislation and others need to join in. Beyond these laws the police need to be better trained on the nuances around speech. Their job is to keep the public safe, not to reach for handcuffs every time someone gets reported on.
Finally, those in the protest movement who treat Hamas as beyond reproach should pause to reflect on the name Odai Al-Rubai – a young protester silenced by the very group claiming to defend his people. Great movements can come undone by the authoritarianism within them that they fail to confront, as much as by their enemies. To protect the cause, protesters must stop defending those who would never defend them.
13 May 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features, Newsletters, Pakistan
A crisis is often seized as an opportunity, especially by those eager to silence dissent – and no more so than in Narendra Modi’s India. Following the deadliest civilian incident in Kashmir in decades, the government has rolled out a coordinated campaign of information control. The Ministry of External Affairs has contacted global news outlets including the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press, criticising them for using the word “militant” rather than “terrorist” in their coverage. Social media accounts of major Pakistani and Kashmiri news organisations have been blocked, including 8,000 accounts on X, and dozens of Pakistani YouTube channels. Meanwhile, dissenting voices are being targeted under sweeping legal charges. This week alone, the police filed cases against folk singer Neha Singh Rathore and university professor Madri Kakoti, accusing them of “endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India” over posts critical of the government’s response.
Such suppression is far from new for those living in Modi’s India, as we highlighted two years ago in our magazine issue devoted to the country. It’s worse still for the residents of Kashmir. Since 2019, when the Indian government revoked the special autonomous status granted to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, censorship and surveillance have become rife. Journalists from Kashmir have frequently written for us about internet blackouts, media bans and a broader clampdown on dissent. It’s been a grinding war on free expression that rarely garners global headlines.
Now, with tensions at a new high, that suppression is intensifying. A correspondent on the ground described a bleak reality to me this week. In the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack last month, which left 25 Indians and one Nepali national dead, thousands of Kashmiris have reportedly been detained, accused of being “overground workers”, a term often used vaguely to suggest militant affiliation. Civilians face beatings for being out after dark. Perhaps most alarming is the growing call from prominent Indian figures for a vengeful response against both Kashmiris and Muslims in line with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
The rhetoric has dire consequences. Prominent Kashmiri journalist Hilal Mir was recently arrested on what sources close to him describe as a trumped-up charge. Authorities allege he was “actively engaged in posting and sharing content aimed at inciting sentiments among young minds and instigating secessionist sentiment by portraying Kashmiris as victims of systemic extermination.” In another instance the body of Imtiaz Ahmad Magray, 23, was found shortly after he was detained, after he reportedly jumped into a river trying to escape. According to police he had confessed to being an overground worker. His family refute such claims.
When asked if Modi’s government is using this crisis to crack down on dissent, the response from the correspondent I’m in touch with was blunt: “Without a doubt.”
9 May 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features, Pakistan
As conflict intensifies between India and Pakistan, those in the disputed region of Kashmir have long faced human rights violations, including a higher level of surveillance and suppression of free speech.
On a cloudy day in January, 30-year-old Hanan* perched on a rock in a nearby forest close to his house in the Handwara area of India-controlled Kashmir. Amongst the daily hustle and bustle in his neighborhood, Hanan and his friends discussed a recent citizens’ survey allegedly conducted by the Indian Army. According to residents, the survey had required them to share private details about their families alongside photos.
“What is really concerning for the locals is [soldiers requesting photos of women],” said Hanan, as he braved the wintry cold breeze in the woods.
His friend, Anzar*, said he had been asked to share a photo of his family members, and had been threatened with severe consequences if he did not comply.
Last year, a similar data collection exercise was conducted throughout Kashmir by the local police force. Alongside personal information being requested, residents were also allegedly asked to share a geotagged photo of the house they were residing in.
Sheeraz* said he first heard about last year’s survey from his younger brother. He fears that the police are sourcing information which could be used to instigate “ethnic cleansing” of the area in future. He likened the surveillance to similar methods used by Israeli forces in order to monitor and track Palestinians, such as facial recognition technology.
Kashmir’s 2024 invasive policing exercise, which was termed “Village X Ray”, sought residents’ details such as their vehicle registration numbers, their affiliations with banned organisations and their Aadhaar numbers (a unique identity card provided by the Indian government).
“They are trying to shrink the space for us in ways unimaginable for many in other parts of the world,” said Sheeraz.
A new era of surveillance
Surveillance of the local population is not new in the contested piece of land between India and Pakistan, but fears have heightened since the region’s autonomy was further eroded in 2019.
In 1987, a state election took place in Jammu and Kashmir that was widely believed to be rigged. The years following this saw an armed rebellion. In an attempt to quell the uprising, India’s government brought approximately 600,000 troops into the region, forcing people to name sympathisers and supporters of the cause against Indian rule, making arbitrary detentions and using torture to stop dissent. It also used various repressive legislative measures, including laws such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Three decades later in August 2019, Narendra Modi’s right-wing Indian government revoked the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region’s special status (Article 370), which had previously granted it semi-autonomy over its administration.
Article 35A was also scrapped, meaning that non-Kashmiris can now buy property in the region, giving a green light for outsiders to acquire the land of indigenous people. This has raised fears that the Indian government is trying to drastically change the demographic of the Muslim-majority region.
“Not only will we lose jobs, the only Muslim-majority [region] will be prone to communal conflicts after this arbitrary decision by the central government,” said Hanan.
Silencing voices
On the night of 5 January 2022, a young journalist from Bandipora’s Hajin area called Sajad Gul was arrested by men in uniform at his home. He was questioned for uploading a video clip to the social media platform X of women in a nearby area allegedly protesting the killing of a local militant leader. He had attended the protest to report on the incident.
The local police detained him under the Public Safety Act, which allows for a maximum two-year detention, among other charges, and transferred him to and from various jails. He was ultimately imprisoned for 910 days for reporting on a story.
In November 2023, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed his detention, saying that there was no concrete evidence or specific allegations proving his actions were prejudicial to the security of the state.
Press freedom has deteriorated since the removal of Kashmir’s special status in 2019. Abdul Aala Fazili, a research scholar, was also arrested in April 2022 by the Jammu and Kashmir State Investigation Agency (SIA) for an article he wrote in 2011 for the online magazine The Kashmir Walla, titled “The shackles of slavery will break”. The news website has been blocked in India since August 2023.
“Since the nullification of the hollowed-out special status, not only are journalists in Kashmir being silenced by various intimidation techniques, but the general public is equally feeling the forced gag,” said Owais*, a history student who is well-versed with what is happening in the region. “People are scared of posting anything remotely related to the region’s disputed status on any social media platforms because they know the consequences.”
“We are all suspects here”
Leaning forward in his chair, a local politician called Saleem* spoke to me from his office in the outskirts of Handwara. When asked about the increasing surveillance in the region, his sharp and incisive response was: “The government of India sees us all as strangers. We are all suspects here for them.” These are strong words from someone who has taken an oath on India’s constitution.
The revoking of Article 370 has caused dynamics to shift, he said. “There was a lot in our hands back in the early 1990s, however now we have lost that bargaining power in the corridors of power.”
In 2022, the Jammu and Kashmir government took another step towards monitoring locals’ movements, even on roads and in shops. An order administered via its policing wing in the Srinagar region put pressure on shopkeepers to install CCTV cameras or face a penalty.
Many opposed it, saying they couldn’t afford the installation costs. Some were wary of installing cameras outside the front of their shops. “I clearly said to the party that I cannot install [it] because there is no need for installation,” said one shopkeeper. “Installing inside makes sense for my business, but not in front of the shop.”
History student Owais said that the attempt to silence people in Kashmir is now “two-pronged”: “One is reporting anyone who speaks for rights on social media platforms, and another is constant police raids at residences just to intimidate not only the suspects but the general public at large in the valley.”
Hanan, strolling back from the woods and towards his home, echoed Owais’s worries about the future of Kashmir. “I do not know what to do in these situations. I am not only concerned for my career, but now, for the last few years, my focus is more on the land I belong to, which I feel will be snatched away from me anytime by a single order of the government.”
* names have been changed to protect the identities of interviewees
7 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United Kingdom
In today’s world of hot takes and moral outrage, we all want clear answers – good, bad, right and wrong – and people we can easily rally behind or blast – villain, victim, hero, heretic. But the cases of Kneecap, Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa have resisted such clarity, and they’ve forced us to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: freedom of expression, especially in moments of deep political pain and division, isn’t always neat, easy or even popular.
First a recap for those who might have missed the stories or got lost in the details:
At the end of April, Belfast band Kneecap came under fire following the circulation of videos in which the group appears to endorse political violence, declaring “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP,” and another showing apparent support for Hezbollah and Hamas, both proscribed as terrorist organisations in the UK. Kneecap insists their remarks were taken out of context, that their tone was satirical and that they do not in fact support these groups. Nevertheless, they are under police investigation and have had several of their shows dropped, following political pressure from MPs including Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party.
Meanwhile Jonny Greenwood, best known as a member of Radiohead, and his collaborator, Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, said this week that they were scheduled to perform two concerts in the UK in June. The events have since been cancelled due to serious and credible threats that made the performances unsafe. The cancellations followed calls from organisations aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Tassa and Greenwood had previously performed together in Tel Aviv in 2024 and Tassa had performed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza at the end of 2023. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, who have called them out in the past, criticised the planned UK concerts as a form of “artwashing genocide” and welcomed news of their cancellation.
Greenwood has denounced the cancellations as censorship, while prominent artists such as Massive Attack have rallied behind Kneecap, framing the backlash they faced as part of a broader attempt to suppress dissent.
These are not simple cases. In the case of Kneecap, their rhetoric was inflammatory and, in invoking violence against politicians, reckless – two MPs have been murdered in this country in recent years after all. Their potential valorisation of Hamas and Hezbollah was far from funny – these groups are guilty of grave human rights violations. Kneecap have tried to deflect attention from their actions by saying that they are not the story and that Gaza is, but people should be free to challenge them and their views. It’s reductionist to say that doing so is somehow taking the focus away from Gaza.
And yet irreverence, political provocation and even transgressive speech have long been cornerstones of artistic expression. Search bands with the word “kill” in their name or album title and you won’t walk away short on examples. Whether Kneecap’s comments were satire or poor judgment, a response in the form of a criminal investigation raises important questions about proportionality and the appropriate limits of state intervention. The European Court of Human Rights has made clear that criminal sanctions should be a last resort in speech cases, and indeed the UK’s legal structures place a high bar on what constitutes incitement. Have the members of Kneecap met this threshold? It’s hard to see that they have.
Likewise, while boycotts are a legitimate form of protest, and protest is an essential pillar of free expression, they too can become a vehicle for coercion. The Greenwood–Tassa concerts were not silenced by public disagreement but by threats credible enough to endanger the performers, venue staff and audiences. That is not protest, it is intimidation.
Cultural boycotts specifically have other free speech complications too: while they typically target authoritarian regimes with the intention of effecting positive change, they can silence the very voices that are most helpful to the cause. In 1975, Index surveyed artists on their views about boycotting Apartheid South Africa and the general response was that it would do more harm than good. “Governments would not go to such lengths to secure silence if they did not fear speech,” said one respondent. “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” said another.
The truth is neither of the current UK situations present a clean clash between good speech and bad. Instead, they sit in an uncomfortable space where moral outrage, political solidarity and artistic freedom collide. Kneecap’s defenders are right to argue that Gaza must remain in focus; they’re wrong to say that this exempts artists from accountability for everything they say. Conversely, critics of Israel and its supporters must be free to speak and protest, but not through threats that endanger lives or undermine the very democratic principles they claim to defend.
At Index, we believe in a broad and inclusive approach to free expression. The right to speak must extend even to those whose views we find offensive, provocative or politically inconvenient. While this does not mean freedom from criticism, it does mean freedom from coercion and violence.
No artist is entitled to a stage and venues shouldn’t be beholden to host certain acts if the situation changes. However, when access to platforms is denied because the views, or even the identity, of the artists are politically contentious, something essential is lost. It becomes harder for culture to serve as a space of honest confrontation and productive dialogue, and easier for fear and conformity to set the limits of what is permissible.
Ultimately, for freedom of expression to mean anything, it must apply to everyone, not just those with whom we agree. Ideas must be challenged, yes, and artists held accountable too, but never through threat and only through the justice system when a high bar has been met. Greenwood said he was sad that those supporting Kneecap’s “freedom of expression are the same ones most determined to restrict ours”. His words are a warning: if you cheer shutting down space for one group, don’t be alarmed when the space of those you want to hear is shut down too.
