13 Aug 2025 | News, United Kingdom, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Ella Ward sat in jail in the UK for 10 months, waiting to be sentenced for planning to disrupt Manchester Airport in August 2024. When the sentence was handed down this May, it was 18 months in prison for Ward, with other protesters receiving up to 30 months.
Ward and their fellow activists from climate change direct action group Just Stop Oil never reached the runway, where they intended to glue themselves as part of a co-ordinated European action. Instead, according to an account from Ward, police arrested the activists on a side street in Manchester just after 4am on 5 August for planning the protest, which would have caused “severe delays”.
Four JSO activists were charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and found guilty in February.
Ward, 22, a former environmental science student at the University of Leeds, is a serial activist. They have slow-marched down roads for JSO (for which they spent time in prison before charges were dropped) and thrown paint over think tank Policy Exchange, and they were one of three young people – under the banner of Youth Demand (an offshoot of JSO) – who left children’s shoes outside the home of Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, to protest against the killings in Gaza.
None of these actions have been violent, although many have caused offence and disruption. But the fact that Ward and others have been sentenced to prison for months demonstrates how the UK has been clamping down on protest when it would once have dealt with such direct actions with fines.
JSO, whose activists threw soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, announced earlier this year that it was stopping its activities.
The official reason given was that its demands – for no new oil and gas licences to be issued – had been met. But at the group’s final demonstration through London in April, it was clear that the imprisonment of key activists was a major concern: there were as many protesters holding up pictures of activists who had been jailed as there were messages about climate change and the fossil fuel industry.
Ths shift in protest policing
Mel Carrington, 63, is a JSO spokesperson who was acquitted in June after blocking the departure gates at Gatwick Airport with suitcases last year. She told Index: “We have to respond to repression, and all our most radical people are in prison. So it does have an impact.”
There are currently 11 JSO protesters behind bars. Co-founder Roger Hallam (also co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, or XR) is serving a four-year sentence (reduced from five years) for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. His crime was playing a major role in a Zoom meeting where he was found to have conspired in a “sophisticated plan” for activists to climb gantries over the M25 – a motorway which circles London – and disrupt traffic. Hallam did not participate in the action, which took place in November 2022, but the law enabled him to be imprisoned for the protest nonetheless.
Locking up climate protesters is relatively new in the UK. Richard Ecclestone, an XR spokesperson and a former police inspector, said the attitude of the police, as well as actual laws, had changed dramatically over the last six years, which he found “very disturbing”. Police used to facilitate protest, now they are shutting it down.
“We don’t want to be like Russia, China or North Korea. That’s not who we are,” he told Index.
Recent anti-protest legislation has given police the power to stop almost any action they don’t like and granted the courts expanded powers to imprison protesters, although the Court of Appeal decided in May that the idea of “disruption” – which led to Swedish climate protester Greta Thunberg being arrested in London – had been drawn too widely and that “serious disruption” could not be categorised as anything “more than minor”.
The 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act has proved particularly effective at shutting down civil disobedience, while protest-related offences under the Public Order Act 2023 were introduced in direct response to environmental activism. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders introduced in 2024 also mean the courts can prevent people from taking part in disruptive protests after they’ve been convicted of protest-related offences, and breaching the order would be a criminal offence.
Mothers supporting daughters
The Labour government, elected last year, is seeking to give police even more powers to control demonstrations. Amnesty International has highlighted provisions in the new Crime and Policing Bill currently going through parliament which seek to ban face masks and criminalise climbing on war memorials.
The courts have also blocked the right for defendants to use beliefs and motivation as a lawful excuse for causing a nuisance, damage or disruption in most cases.
Ward’s mother (who didn’t want her name to be published) was on the march, as was Rebecca, the mother of Ruby Hamill, another protester who, at the age of 19, was held in prison for slow-marching. Ruby has now been released. Both mothers went on the final JSO march in support of their daughters.
Ward’s mother told Index: “My daughter is very passionate and compassionate and feels deeply about the injustice of the climate crisis and how it’s affecting the global south, and wants to let people know as much as possible. She’s done the most she possibly can do by putting her liberty on the line. She knew the potential outcome.
“She told the jury in the trial she would be at peace with whether she is found guilty or not guilty … the point of her action is to get the message out there. I’m here in solidarity with my daughter and all the other people who have been imprisoned.
“It’s a very conflicting place for a parent – so worried about them being in prison but conversely proud of them for standing up for their beliefs.”
The UK’s deteriorating record
The UK has a poor record when it comes to arresting climate protesters who, like JSO members, have been non-violent and allow themselves to be arrested.
A recent report from the University of Bristol, called the Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, looked at government responses across a range of countries.
The report found that 17% of climate and environmental protests in the UK involved arrest, making it the second most likely country (after Australia at 20%) to take environmental protesters into police custody.
It is not the only country to have clamped down heavily on climate protest. France has reached for anti-terror laws, and Spain, Germany and the USA have used legislation designed to tackle organised crime.
Separately, climate activists in the UK have often been subject to civil proceedings such as injunctions which prevent named (and sometimes unnamed) individuals from going near certain places. Carrington says these injunctions can be as intimidating as criminalisation, making people afraid they could lose their savings or their jobs.
In 2022, JSO protester Louise Lancaster was ordered to pay £22,000 for breaching an injunction preventing her going on the M25.
Carrington herself found that she couldn’t renew her house insurance because of proceedings against her. She also claimed teachers had discovered their jobs were at risk because criminal prosecutions for climate change action turned up in Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
Another way forward?
All of this risks environmental protesters going underground and carrying out actions with less accountability. There are already organisations such as The Tyre Extinguishers whose members deliberately let down the tyres of SUVs and then scarper, or Shut The System, which sabotages infrastructure.
But the authors of the Bristol report recommended another way forward.
“Governments, legislatures, courts and police forces should operate with a general presumption against criminalising climate and environmental protests,” it said. “Instead, climate and environmental protest should be regarded as a reasonable response to the urgent and existential nature of the climate crisis, and activists engaged as stakeholders in a process of just transition.”
The leaders of climate change movements agree and are working out how to pivot to a less disruptive street-based approach and one which might garner more public support. Ecclestone says XR was interested in using citizens’ assemblies to achieve change and that a lot of work was going on to see how that could be made to work.
Carrington said JSO had a project as part of the umbrella group Assemble which aimed to build on the idea that politics was broken and corrupt, and that building a political project from the grassroots up was the way to achieve change.
She said: “What we need to do more than ever is to come together and to work together to survive the storm that’s coming.”
17 Mar 2025 | Americas, News, United States
Index on Censorship has much in common with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. We were all established during the Cold War, us in 1972 and RFE and RL in 1950 and 1953 respectively. We were all designed to offer uncensored news and alternative viewpoints to countries behind the Iron Curtain. And we all went beyond the Cold War remit both geographically and chronologically. Index never just covered the USSR, while the Radio Free brand later expanded into newsrooms operating across the globe; none of us closed shop in 1991.
Our shared central mission – to cover oppression whenever it manifested and to centre the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced – has not always been easy or free from controversy. But the attacks never felt existential. Until Donald Trump’s administration.
Building on threats already made to close RFE/RL and Voice of America, which we reported about here, on 14 March the White House issued an Executive Order aimed at “[r]educing the Scope of the Federal Bureaucracy”. Among the agencies impacted was USAGM, which funds RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia and VOA. On 15 March, RFE/RL was notified by the USAGM that its federal grant agreement, which funds its global operations, has been terminated. RFA was similarly notified by USAGM special adviser Kari Lake that its grant had been terminated and that the organisation must “promptly refund any unobligated funds”. The director of VOA, Michael Abramowitz, confirmed that “virtually the entire staff of Voice of America—more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff—has been placed on administrative leave” as well.
These attacks feel as personal to us as they are political.
The White House published a news article focused on VOA, highlighting the importance of the funding cuts to “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
The idea that they are “radical propaganda” is rubbish, more double speak from an administration that will argue left means right. The Radio Free outlets and VOA, all of whom are editorially independent from the US government, run huge newsrooms staffed by people trained to the highest standards. They have played a vital role in the global media environment, with their journalists taking great risks to operate in countries that have severely curtailed media freedom, such as Belarus, Myanmar, China, North Korea and Russia.
Abramowitz said VOA provides “objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny”, while RFA President and CEO Bay Fang has described the move as “a reward to dictators and despots” and one that “benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense”. Renew Europe, a group of European MEPs, warned that these cuts could “leave a void that could be exploited by authoritarian regimes seeking to suppress free speech and control narratives.” We can only agree. Several autocrats have already welcomed the move.
The decision comes as the USAID funding freeze has already endangered public-interest journalism, particularly in Ukraine, where it has supported coverage of Russia’s unlawful invasion and the actions of the Ukrainian government. As Kyiv Independent’s editor Olga Rudenko highlighted, the sudden funding cuts have forced some Ukrainian outlets to slash their budgets by 90%. This crisis extends beyond Ukraine, threatening the entire global media landscape.
So here is our message to all of those who have been impacted: we stand firmly in solidarity with you. In today’s world, where lies are cheap, the brand of journalism that RFE/RL and others champion is not a luxury – it is an essential tool to safeguard democratic accountability. There is a reason these brands outlived the Cold War. It’s now up to all of us to help see them through the Trump years.
6 Nov 2024 | News, United States
Waking up to today’s news that Donald Trump has been re-elected as president of the USA is deeply troubling. Despite what he claims, Trump is no poster boy for free speech. We at Index have many grave concerns about what another four years under him could mean for the USA and the world.
The first of these concerns is media freedom. His record on this is worrying. During his last term as president, Trump constantly appeared on our website and in our magazine. David E. McCraw, the New York Times deputy general counsel, spoke to us about the physical violence journalists were facing in the USA as a result of Trump; the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Nina Khrushcheva, wrote about his lashing out at various mainstream media with labels like “enemy of the people” and even said life in the Soviet Union was better in this regard:
“Once a Soviet citizen, I’ve been checking my surroundings. Am I living in cosmopolitan New York? Am I back in a homogeneous Moscow reading the Pravda headlines about the drummed-up victories of the communist state and the denunciations of the enemies who plot to take it down? In fact, when I was growing up in the 1970s, not even Pravda used such ominous language for Kremlin critics.”
Alas if Trump is to be taken at his word, his first four years in power were simply the dress rehearsal before the real show. Project 25, the Republican Party’s 900-page policy wish-list, includes plans to seize journalists’ emails and phones, while campaign-trail Trump frequently railed against the media, threatening to arrest those who disparage him and to strip television networks of their broadcast licenses. This might partly explain why Jeff Bezos crushed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Self-censorship is after all self-preservation.
This Sunday Trump said he wouldn’t have minded if journalists had been shot during his assassination attempt.
Such language incites. Reporters have spoken about feeling very unsafe at Trump rallies. Such language is also not limited to the media. His desire to throw people in jail extends to his detractors more broadly and is often personal. His campaign team claims his “firing squad” comment towards former US Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney has been taken out of context. Perhaps. Still there is no denying that he launched a vicious attack, solely because she was on Team Kamala.
This leads onto our broader concerns for freedom of expression in the USA. Minority voices will be further marginalised. So too will the voices of those who simply wish to criticise Trump or pull up his administration when it falls short. Even the best administrations fall short. Never mind ones staffed with conspiracists and liars. The implications are terrifying.
All the while Trump’s particular style of “noisy” leadership feels structurally built to erode USA democracy. In Umberto Eco’s essay Censorship and Silence, the Italian twentieth century scholar argued that too much information was an intentional tactic. Noise becomes an instrument of censorship and a tool of totalitarianism. It drowns out what we should be hearing. Trump likely knows this; his constant chatter is, many believe, done on purpose, the chaos it creates aimed at frustrating and distracting the public.
This does not just concern people in the USA. It concerns all of us, especially anyone living under dictatorships. Autocrats benefit from our distraction. Is it any surprise that, with our attention fixed on Israel-Palestine and indeed the USA, Saudi Arabia has carried out the highest number of executions this year since 1990 and that few have spoken about this?
Moving forward our fears deepen for those who live in totalitarian states and we fear too for people in Ukraine, the Baltics and in the Middle East given Trump’s allegiances in those regions.
Trump was voted in – but concerns have been raised about how fair the election was, starting with accusations once again of Russian meddling, the fact that one of Trump’s biggest supporters (Elon Musk) runs a highly influential social media platform and offered money to people voting in swing states, and stories of ballot boxes being set on fire. But in the grand scheme of elections, where countries like North Korea don’t hold any, it is undeniable that the USA’s 2024 ones were closer to free and fair.
That his election was democratic provides no solace, however. The world is not short on examples of autocrats who received a popular vote at the start. Victor Orban. Narendra Modi. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A vote is only one function of a democratic system and it is all too often imperfect.
As newspaper columnists address what led to this moment we pledge to work tirelessly to hold Trump to account on free speech.
When Index was launched in the early 1970s our mission was always to look at censorship everywhere and to not assume that we in the so-called West will have freedoms tomorrow just because we have them today. In the decades since we have tirelessly reported on and promoted free expression. We’ve successfully campaigned to change laws, to free prisoners of conscience, to get people off death row. We will continue to work in this way and we will report on every violation to free speech that Donald Trump and those in his government make. We will do our best to ensure the right to free expression does not bear the brunt of his presidency.
We know we need to make the case for free speech even stronger too. It is simply not good enough that the loudest voices talking about free speech are the very voices that want to dismantle it.
Today is a day of despair. It is also a day for collective action, for those of us who genuinely care about free speech to come together to protect and promote it. Please join us.
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6 Sep 2024 | Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News, Newsletters
It is September and the kids are back at school. Many will likely be excited for the year ahead but perhaps not Hong Kong students. They’re returning to a new lesson: Xi Jinping Thought. As announced this week, the curriculum has been updated in secondary schools to include teachings from China’s leader. The new module aims to instil “patriotic education”.
I pity these kids, I really do. Firstly because unlike Mao, who many saw as a great wordsmith (a tyrant yes but a tyrant who could write lyrically and coin a zinger, “revolution is not a dinner party” being one classic example), Xi’s words are flat. The Economist declared his Thought “woolly: a hodgepodge of Dengist and Maoist terminology combined with mostly vague ideas on topics ranging from the environment (making China “beautiful”) to building a “world-class” army.” The academic Kevin Carrico studied his Thought through a distance-learning course and wrote that it was impoverished. “It comes across as a cash-rich North Korea,” he said. I’ve never got very far. Sentences like “The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism” contain too many words and too little meaning.
But beyond criticising the content is a much bigger issue. As one Hongkonger said in response to the announcement, it’s “brainwashing”. That it is. And more than that. It’s another way to strip Hong Kong of its unique identity. The curriculum is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity” and by identity that means one dictated through the narrow lens of the Chinese Communist Party from Beijing.
Since it was introduced formally in China in 2017, Xi Jinping Thought has become a mainstay of academic life throughout the country for all levels of students. In our forthcoming Autumn magazine, which looks at how scientists are being attacked worldwide, Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun lays bare some of the absurdities of this:
“Every scientist needs to study Xi’s speeches and thoughts. Their Western counterparts may not be able to empathise with this but imagine a group of physicists or astronomy professors sitting in a conference room at MIT or Harvard, studying Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s speeches, and then considering how much it would help in their research.”
Xi Jinping Thought should be relegated to the history books not promoted to textbooks. But classrooms have always been central to Beijing’s ambitions in Hong Kong, which partly explains why many of the protest leaders were students. In 2010, for example, then Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang announced plans to change primary education so that its messages were more in line with the CCP (one teaching manual called the CCP an “advanced, selfless and united ruling group”). These plans were shelved due to widespread protests, protests which themselves were later removed or reworded in textbooks. More recently, in 2022 history textbooks were rewritten to downplay the city’s colonial past. Today they’re taking the textbook meddling one step further.
Here’s a kicker: interference in textbooks by Beijing is happening in the UK too. The Telegraph reported this week that British GCSE books were edited to remove references to Taiwan after complaints from Chinese officials. The AQA GCSE Chinese textbook deleted references to “the Republic of China” (Taiwan) from subsequent editions. The first edition of the GCSE textbook said: “Yangmingshan National Park is the third national park of the Republic of China, and the park is located in the northern part of Taipei City.” Later editions: “Yangmingshan National Park is a very famous national park.”
The UK is not Hong Kong and the CCP cares a lot less about what British textbooks contain. And yet they still clearly care. There’s a long road to be taken before a few words removed from a Mandarin-teaching title turns into Xi Jinping Thought on the UK syllabus and it’s encouraging that Lord Alton raised the issue in Parliament this week. We must not journey further down this road and not just because his Thought is deathly dull.
Finally, on the note of back to school a reminder of the many girls of Afghanistan who are not starting school at all. Last year we gave the Index campaigning award to Matiullah Wesa, who together with his brother founded Pen Path, a remarkable organisation dedicated to improving girls’ education in Afghanistan. For over a decade, Wesa has travelled the country with his mobile library, distributing books to children and working to establish schools in conflict-riven areas. Today he meets with Taliban leaders to call for schools to be reopened for girls. Wesa is a frequent target of the Taliban and has been imprisoned. He dreams of a time when he can retire this work because access to education – a universal right – is respected and promoted in Afghanistan. Today that dream has never felt further away.
All of the above reinforces a line we often say at Index: freedoms are hard won and easily lost. So students: cherish learning, enjoy debate and never take the ability to enquire more, to read widely and to speak freely for granted.
