A major new global ranking index tracking the state of free expression published today (Wednesday, 25 January) by Index on Censorship sees the UK ranked as only “partially open” in every key area measured.
In the overall rankings, the UK fell below countries including Australia, Israel, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Japan. European neighbours such as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Denmark also all rank higher than the UK.
The IndexIndex, developed by Index on Censorship and experts in machine learning and journalism at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), uses innovative machine learning techniques to map the free expression landscape across the globe, giving a country-by-country view of the state of free expression across academic, digital and media/press freedoms.
Key findings include:
The countries with the highest ranking (“open”) on the overall Index are clustered around western Europe and Australasia – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.
The UK and USA join countries such as Botswana, Czechia, Greece, Moldova, Panama, Romania, South Africa and Tunisia ranked as “partially open”.
The poorest performing countries across all metrics, ranked as “closed”, are Bahrain, Belarus, Burma/Myanmar, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Countries such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates performed poorly in the IndexIndex but are embedded in key international mechanisms including G20 and the UN Security Council.
Ruth Anderson, Index on Censorship CEO, said:
“The launch of the new IndexIndex is a landmark moment in how we track freedom of expression in key areas across the world. Index on Censorship and the team at Liverpool John Moores University have developed a rankings system that provides a unique insight into the freedom of expression landscape in every country for which data is available.
“The findings of the pilot project are illuminating, surprising and concerning in equal measure. The United Kingdom ranking may well raise some eyebrows, though is not entirely unexpected. Index on Censorship’s recent work on issues as diverse as Chinese Communist Party influence in the art world through to the chilling effect of the UK Government’s Online Safety Bill all point to backward steps for a country that has long viewed itself as a bastion of freedom of expression.
“On a global scale, the IndexIndex shines a light once again on those countries such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates with considerable influence on international bodies and mechanisms – but with barely any protections for freedom of expression across the digital, academic and media spheres.”
Nik Williams, Index on Censorship policy and campaigns officer, said:
“With global threats to free expression growing, developing an accurate country-by-country view of threats to academic, digital and media freedom is the first necessary step towards identifying what needs to change. With gaps in current data sets, it is hoped that future ‘IndexIndex’ rankings will have further country-level data that can be verified and shared with partners and policy-makers.
“As the ‘IndexIndex’ grows and develops beyond this pilot year, it will not only map threats to free expression but also where we need to focus our efforts to ensure that academics, artists, writers, journalists, campaigners and civil society do not suffer in silence.”
Steve Harrison, LJMU senior lecturer in journalism, said:
“Journalists need credible and authoritative sources of information to counter the glut of dis-information and downright untruths which we’re being bombarded with these days. The IndexIndex is one such source, and LJMU is proud to have played our part in developing it.
“We hope it becomes a useful tool for journalists investigating censorship, as well as a learning resource for students. Journalism has been defined as providing information someone, somewhere wants suppressed – the IndexIndex goes some way to living up to that definition.”
Pushkin House invites you to a joint celebration of Zinovy Zinik’s collection of short stories No Cause for Alarm (2022) and the winter issue of the Index on Censorship magazine, which features one of his stories.
The publication of Zinovy Zinik’s collection of short stories in Russia coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year. The idea of launching the newly published book in Moscow has become unthinkable. “I feel again in a state of being ‘locked out’, like I felt four decades ago when I arrived in London to work for the BBC World Service”, says Zinik in his interview to Martin Bright, Editor at Large of Index on Censorship. One of the consequences of the harrowing war in Ukraine was a new wave of mass migration of the Russian intelligentsia to Europe and beyond.
Martin Bright and Zinovy Zinik will be discussing the paradoxes of different forms of exile, the sense of complicity and dissent, vagaries of censorship, as well as cultural stereotypes that new arrivals in Britain from different countries have to confront. Their conversation will be accompanied by the author’s reading of excerpts from his surreal novella ‘His Master’s Voice’, published in Index on Censorship magazine.
About the speakers
A Moscow-born author Zinovy Zinik was stripped of his Russian citizenship in 1975 when he left the Soviet Union for Israel. He was invited to come to Britain in 1976 to work for the BBC. Since then he has been living and working in London. Zinik’s eighteen books of prose include novels, collections of short stories and essays that dwell on the subject of dual existence of bilingual immigrants, religious converts and social outcasts. His short stories and his novel Russian Service were adapted for Radio 3 and his novel The Mushroom Picker was made into a film by the BBC TV (1993). Zinik’s shorter prose and essays appeared in The Guardian, The Encounter, The New Yorker, N+1, Index on Censorship, Eurozine and other periodicals. He regularly contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and BBC radio. His recent books in English include an autobiographical tale History Thieves (Seagull Books, London, 2011) and a novel Sounds Familiar or the Beast of Artek (Divus, London, 2016). His nonfictional My Private Prime Meridian was published in the collection Lucifer Over London (Influx Press, 2020). During the last four years he has also published four books of prose in Russian, including a novel The Orgone Box and a nonfictional Yarmulke under the Turban.
Martin Bright is the Editor at Large at Index on Censorship. He has over 30 years of experience as a journalist, working for The Observer, The Guardian and The New Statesman among others. He has worked on several high-profile freedom of expression cases often involving government secrecy. He broke the story of Iraq War whistleblower Katharine Gun, which was made into the movie Official Secrets (2019) starring Keira Knightley.
He is the founder of Creative Society, a youth employment charity set up in response to the economic crash of 2008.
The prominent Soviet-era Russian dissident Viktor Fainberg died this week at the age of 91. Fainberg, who was a philologist, was one of the eight people who protested in Red Square, Moscow on 25 August 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, alongside Pavel Litvinov and the late poet Natalya Gorbanyevskaya, among others. Despite the protest lasting only five minutes, all were arrested by the Soviet authorities.
All these people were instrumental in the founding of Index, as Jo-Ann Mort’s interview with Pavel Litvinov, published here, shows.
On Fainberg specifically, after his arrest he was brutally assaulted by the police to the point where he could not physically stand trial. Fainberg was examined, then sent to a Leningrad psychiatric hospital for over four years with no evidence of mental illness – details of which he shared with the translator Richard McKane who he met at an Index on Censorship party in the 1970s. He was then diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was a common tactic during the Khrushchev era to repress dissenters and silence voices of criticism in the Soviet Union, which continued into the Brezhnev era.
In the spring of 1971, Fainberg staged an 81-day hunger strike against conditions in the psychiatric hospital, and was eventually released in February 1973.
Fainberg founded the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse in April 1975, an organisation which campaigned against the abuse of human rights through misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. The country withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983.
After his release, Fainberg, born into a Jewish family in Kharkiv, Ukraine on 26 November 1931, initially moved to Israel before settling in France in later life.
In 2014, Fainberg received the Medal of the President of the Slovak Republic for his actions in 1968, and in 2018 received the Gratias Agit award from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic.
He kept up his activism to the end, shifting his focus to Ukraine. Years before the recent invasion, Fainberg spoke out against the Kremlin’s Ukrainian political prisoners. He also warned of the “shadow of Munich hanging over Europe”.
In his 2015 letter to abducted Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who was on hunger strike in a Russian prison, he wrote “I was born in Ukraine, in Kharkiv. The first nature that I saw, the first songs that I heard, were the nature and the songs of Mother Ukraine”. At the end of the letter, Fainberg told Savchenko that he was joining her hunger strike (which she later agreed to end). Fainberg also attended many protests in Paris, demanding the release of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.
On news of his death Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessmen who was himself jailed for falling foul of the Putin regime, said:
“He was an amazing, remarkable man who felt other people’s pain as if it were his own. The world is a different place without him – even less human, even colder.”
On behalf of the below signed organisations, we would like to congratulate your appointment as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs. At a time of significant global uncertainty and unrest, the UK can and must play a leading role in promoting human rights globally. While we appreciate the wide and diverse range of issues facing you and your department, we are contacting you today to draw your attention to the treatment of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia who have been imprisoned for expressing themselves.
The Specialized Criminal Court (SCC), established in 2008 to try those suspected of acts of terrorism, has instead administered disproportionate sentences, including the death sentence, to people solely for expressing themselves online. Cloaked in the language of cybercrime, this has effectively criminalised free expression and has also been brought to bear against individuals outside of Saudi Arabia.
You will have heard about the shameful case of Saudi national Salma al-Shehab, who was a student at the University of Leeds at the time of her alleged ‘crimes’ – sharing content in support of prisoners of conscience and women human right defenders, such as Loujain Alhathloul. For this, upon Salma al-Shehab’s return to Saudi Arabia, she was arrested and held arbitrarily for nearly a year, before being sentenced to 34 years in prison with a subsequent 34-year travel ban. The fact that the sentence is four years longer than the maximum sentence suggested by the country’s anti-terror laws for activities such as supplying explosives or hijacking an aircraft demonstrates the egregious and dangerous standard established both by the SCC and the Saudi regime to restrict free expression. It also further illustrates the Saudi government’s abusive system of surveillance and infiltration of social media platforms to silence public dissent.
But the actions aimed at Salma al-Shehab did not happen in isolation. In fact, her sentencing is the latest in a longstanding trend that has seen the Saudi judiciary and the state at-large being co-opted to target civil society and fundamental human rights. The same day that al-Shehab was sentenced, the SCC sentenced another woman, Nourah bint Saeed Al-Qahtani, to 45 years in prison after using social media to peacefully express her views. Ten Egyptian Nubians were sentenced to up to 18 years in prison after they were arrested and detained – for two months they were held incommunicado and without access to their lawyers or family – after organising a symposium commemorating the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Dr Lina al-Sharif was arbitrarily detained for over a year following her social media activism after a group of agents of the Presidency of State Security raided her family home and arrested her without a warrant. A worrying dimension is the use of violence and torture to coerce confessions, as well as ongoing persecution or surveillance following a prisoner’s release, further eroding the legitimacy of the SCC and its verdicts.
The UK’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia should not bind your hands to upholding human rights commitments and calling out violations when they are brought to your attention, particularly, in the case of al-Shehab, where they relate to the application of Saudi legislation for actions that took place within the territory of the United Kingdom. In fact, this relationship places you in a strong position to call for the release of all prisoners unlawfully held in Saudi Arabia without delay.
Acting definitively so early in your tenure would be a powerful symbol both to our allies and others that the UK can be a trusted protector of human rights and the rule of law.
A Moscow-born author Zinovy Zinik was stripped of his Russian citizenship in 1975 when he left the Soviet Union for Israel. He was invited to come to Britain in 1976 to work for the BBC. Since then he has been living and working in London. Zinik’s eighteen books of prose include novels, collections of short stories and essays that dwell on the subject of dual existence of bilingual immigrants, religious converts and social outcasts. His short stories and his novel Russian Service were adapted for Radio 3 and his novel The Mushroom Picker was made into a film by the BBC TV (1993). Zinik’s shorter prose and essays appeared in The Guardian, The Encounter, The New Yorker, N+1, Index on Censorship, Eurozine and other periodicals. He regularly contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and BBC radio. His recent books in English include an autobiographical tale History Thieves (Seagull Books, London, 2011) and a novel Sounds Familiar or the Beast of Artek (Divus, London, 2016). His nonfictional My Private Prime Meridian was published in the collection Lucifer Over London (Influx Press, 2020). During the last four years he has also published four books of prose in Russian, including a novel The Orgone Box and a nonfictional Yarmulke under the Turban.
Martin Bright is the Editor at Large at Index on Censorship. He has over 30 years of experience as a journalist, working for The Observer, The Guardian and The New Statesman among others. He has worked on several high-profile freedom of expression cases often involving government secrecy. He broke the story of Iraq War whistleblower Katharine Gun, which was made into the movie Official Secrets (2019) starring Keira Knightley.