3 Sep 2025 | News and features, United Kingdom
There have been two stories this past week which could be read as incitement to hitting men in the bollocks. One of the perpetrators was met with five armed officers at Heathrow Airport, the other was lauded as a have-a-go hero. One involved the comedian Graham Linehan, and the other involved the Queen. Only one of them actually carried out the act (admittedly several decades ago), but she wasn’t the one who found herself in a police cell.
The story about a teenage Camilla Shand who, in her own words “whacked a man in the nuts” when he groped her on a train, is told in a new biography of the Queen. It has been used to explain why the Queen became an advocate for women’s rights in later life. Linehan, the creator of the acclaimed series Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books is also a campaigner. As the introduction to his articles on the blogging platform Substack states: “I write about the current all-out assault on woman’s rights.” While Camilla’s campaigning has only served to burnish her reputation, Linehan was cancelled after his gender-critical views brought him into direct conflict with the trans rights movement.
In December he announced he was moving to Arizona as a result of this cancellation. But on Sunday he returned to the UK, only to be arrested, held in a prison cell for hours and questioned about his posts, as he documents in his Substack. While the Met police have not named Linehan, they have confirmed his account of events.
Which brings us to the offending posts. According to Linehan, they are as follows. One, posted on 19 April, shows an image of a trans-rights protest with the comment “A photo you can smell”. This is followed up with “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em”. These are indeed offensive and intended to be so. But it is difficult to see how they could be interpreted as incitement to violence. The third tweet posted the next day is more problematic. But only the second half has been quoted in most of the media coverage of the arrest. The whole tweet reads: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Whether or not you agree with his definition of an abusive act he is making precisely the same argument as the cheerleaders for the young Camilla, although she whacked her groper in the nuts before she called the cops.
This is not Graham Linehan’s first run-in with the police over his anti-trans stance. On Thursday he will appear at Westminster magistrates court accused of the online harassment of 18-year-old transgender activist Sophia Brooks and damaging her phone at a public event last year. He denies all charges.
Linehan’s arrest is further evidence of a faultline in the free speech landscape where the trans debate is concerned. As Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic, there have been several instances of trans allies calling openly for violence against those whose views they disagree with and who have not been dealt with in this way. A genuinely pluralistic society cannot have two-tier justice in this area.
Linehan’s case raises serious questions about how we police speech online. We know there are consequences when posts go viral and incitement to violence is a reality. But in many cases there are no consequences except to the author of the posts. We may not approve of Linehan’s call to vigilante action against abuse of women’s spaces, if that is what it was. But the suppression of his free expression rights may be more damaging in the long run.
Index on Censorship was founded as a response to the repression of writers and academics behind the Iron Curtain. Advocacy for dissidents remains the priority of the organisation. Some would argue that Linehan is a dissident. It is questionable whether it is ever possible to be a dissident in a country where freedom of speech has genuine legal protections – it is a strange kind of police state where ministers intervene to suggest officers have been too heavy-handed. The real concern is whether Linehan’s arrest is evidence of the erosion of those protections. JK Rowling condemned the action as “totalitarian”, while commentator Piers Morgan said “Britain’s turning into North Korea.” Although this is perhaps overstating it, what happened to Linehan at Heathrow airport this week certainly looks like police overreach. It also seems odd that Linehan has been instructed not to post on X while on bail, surely an unnecessary restriction of his rights.
It is tempting to see this as a comedy arrest by bumbling cops. But a genuinely open society does not police speech with the tactics of an authoritarian state.
18 Aug 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Ukraine, United States, 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.
In April 2022, two months after the invasion of Ukraine, a bill designating the USA as “the main enemy of the Russian Federation” was submitted by several deputies of the Russian Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament). It was political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann – deemed to be a foreign agent by the Russian authorities – who told Index about this “strange bill”, as she described it. It was meant to amend the law on countermeasures in response to hostile acts by foreign states, which was passed in 2018.
In July 2024 – four months prior to US president Donald Trump’s election victory – six of the seven deputies who had submitted the bill withdrew their signatures.
“Usually this happens when [legislators] realise that their initiative is not going to pass, or that the timing is bad – or that it is politically risky,” Schulmann said.
It seems that the deputies got wind that “the outcome of the election would be such that the US would no longer be [Russia’s] foe – but a friend, if not the best friend”, she added.
In April 2025, the Council of the Duma, an organisational body within parliament, suggested dismissing the bill.
“The political situation changed – and the [bill’s] initiators were nowhere to be found,” said Schulmann.
Trump and the Russian narrative
The re-election of Trump was also pivotal in shaping the Kremlin’s rhetoric. In July 2022, Dmitry Kiselyov, host of Russian political show Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week), dedicated a whole segment to then US president Joe Biden’s poor health, speaking of his “cognitive problems”, according to independent news outlet Verstka.
And in February 2025, the host praised the new US president, saying: “Putin perceives in Trump his own quality – restraint.”
Vladimir Putin himself called Trump a “courageous man” after his victory. As for Trump, he publicly refused to call the Russian president a dictator (he had said Putin was “genius” and “savvy” on other occasions).
What’s more, Trump seems to be repeating the Kremlin’s claims about Ukraine’s responsibility for the aggression. “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said in April.
And when he called Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” in February, he was echoing rhetoric from the Kremlin.
Trump’s criticism of the Ukrainian government is, in turn, used in Russian propaganda, which brainwashes people into supporting Putin’s politics. For example, in February, Kiselyov called Zelenskyy “a mediocre comedian”, according to Verstka, which mirrored Trump’s words about him being “a modestly successful comedian”. Kiselyov reportedly said that Trump “tolerated Zelenskyy for a long time, but now his disgust is obvious”.
Not only does Trump give credit to Putin’s official narrative but, since he took office, the White House has been debating lifting sanctions on Russian organisations and oligarchs, according to Reuters.
In an interview with the independent media outlet Zhivoy Gvozd in April, 83-year-old dissident-in-exile Lev Ponomaryov said that if the sanctions on the Kremlin’s officials were lifted during peace talks, it would allow for the “semi-fascist” regime to remain in place after the war ended. In fact, he is worried that the repression “will only become more severe” when the war is over, because Putin will need to reinforce his position domestically.
An end to Russia’s pariah status?
Talking to Index from Russia, independent politician Dmitriy Kisiev said that, for him, “it’s hard to imagine things getting worse” than they are today. He was the head of the team which stood behind the campaign of Boris Nadezhdin, the pro-peace candidate barred from running in the presidential election in March 2024.
According to Kisiev – and he admitted this might sound surprising – Trump’s presidency could ultimately benefit Russian civil society. He argued that Trump established “some sort of dialogue” with the Kremlin, which could eventually result in Russia becoming more integrated with the rest of the world. In that case, its civil society would be “freer and more protected”. He is concerned about Russia potentially “heading in the wrong direction”, like North Korea, which he described as “a very closed country and a totalitarian state”.
He used the example of Western companies, the majority of which left Russia at the beginning of the war. Their presence acted “as a kind of limiting factor” on the government and helped to deter the creation of overly harsh laws or regulations. This also applied to student exchange programmes and international tourism, which are no longer there either, he said.
Kisiev added that when Trump began talking about peace, speaking about it became safer in Russia. Whereas previously “peace politics” were supported by less than half the population, “today it feels as though more people are for peace”.
In a recent survey by the independent Levada Centre, more than half the respondents said they were in favour of peace talks. The number of people who believed peace negotiations “should definitely begin” (30%) has never been higher. The survey was conducted with 1,617 adults across Russia.
Kisiev underlined that Trump brought hope for peace to people in the face of despair. The pro-peace stance being voiced by more people, he said, could eventually lead to the end of the “special military operation” in Ukraine. When that happens, he believes Russia could evolve in a more “humanistic direction”.
“Some laws would be revised as there would be no more need for such harsh punishments,” he said, referring to legislation passed when the war began – the censorship law which criminalises “discreditation” of the Russian armed forces.
He tries to remain optimistic, saying that if he didn’t believe things could change for the better then he wouldn’t be taking the risk of being an opposition politician in Russia today.
When asked whether Russia’s repressive legislation could be amended or even abolished if the war ends, political scientist Schulmann said the Russian state system was “flexible”, which is “one of the main features of modern autocracies, [making] them different from the totalitarian systems of the 20th century”.
“They are the ones setting the norms,” she said. “A change in the political context can result in changes in the legislation … even though I don’t think that the system would want to get rid of such a convenient instrument as the war censorship law.”
Faint hopes for peace
An independent parliamentary deputy from Moscow, who requested anonymity, spoke to Index about the “faint hope” for peace raised by Trump, echoing Kisiev. But, alluding to the difficult peace negotiations, he said it was “hope which rises and falls, again and again”.
He highlighted that it was not only the public and the opposition in Russia who were fatigued by the war but also deputies from the Kremlin’s United Russia party.
He hopes that a peace agreement would allow his country to “go back in time to a more democratic era”.
But he said that repression remained as severe as it was at the beginning of the war and pro-democracy movements were still being crushed.
One recent example was the request by the Ministry of Justice to liquidate opposition party Grazhdanskaya Initsiativa (Civic Initiative) in May.
The same month, Grigory Melkonyants, co-founder of the election watchdog Golos (Voice), was sentenced to five years in prison after he was found guilty of working for an “undesirable organisation”.
Meanwhile, Trump’s politics continue to affect Russian refugees and opposition movements abroad.
Index spoke to LGBTQ+ activist Nadezhda Shchetinina, who fled Russia for the USA after the LGBTQ+ movement was labelled extremist in November 2023. “Since Trump took office, the [Customs and Border Protection] programme that allowed me to get to the United States safely is no longer operating,” she said.
Trump’s war on immigration and international aid
The second Trump administration has implemented harsh anti-immigration policies. One of its executive orders states that admitting refugees is now considered “detrimental” to US national interests.
Shchetinina said that Russians arriving in the USA have not been welcomed, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. And with Trump as president, “there is less hope that this situation will improve”.
“Everything is being done to prevent Russian political refugees from getting here, even though we have every right to [seek political refuge],” she said.
Many Russian immigrants – including those who have fled to the USA for political reasons – are kept in detention centres, she added. People are deported back to Russia despite the risks of being arrested as soon as they cross the border.
On top of this, the Trump administration has tried to dismantle multiple pro-democratic media outlets through funding cuts, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which are funded by the federal government. These outlets historically broadcast to countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Since then, they have continued reaching and covering authoritarian states, including Russia, countering state propaganda. Although some funding for these media outlets has been restored, their future is bleak under Trump amid his administration’s attacks, cuts to services and the resulting mass staff layoffs.
The president’s shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also severely affects campaign groups, NGOs and independent media that oppose Putin abroad. Those impacted include Kovcheg (The Ark), which supports Russians who have fled because of their anti-war position; international human rights organisation Memorial; and also Golos, whose co-founder was jailed in May.
The human rights non-profit Free Russia Foundation has also had its funding heavily impacted, according to independent media outlet Meduza. Founded in the USA in 2014, FRF supports Russian political prisoners, refugees and civil society.
In 2024, it was labelled an “extremist organisation” by the Russian government. Its vice-president – dissident and former political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza – was released in the prisoner swap between Russia and the West in 2024. He became one of the key figures of Russian opposition abroad. In his speech in April at the opening of an exhibition in Paris dedicated to Russian political prisoners, Faces of Russian Resistance, he stressed that discussions between Trump and Putin had centred on economic issues rather than human rights.
“We hear [Trump and Putin] talk about minerals, [frozen] assets; American businesses coming back to Russia; direct flights – anything but the people,” he said.
He stressed the importance of releasing hostages of war, including children kidnapped in occupied Ukraine, and Russian political prisoners. “The only reason they [political prisoners] are imprisoned is that they spoke against this criminal war,” he said.
Olga Romanova, director of civil rights organisation Russia Behind Bars, recently said in an interview that Trump was not concerned about Russian political prisoners – including minors.
Dozens of teenagers have been imprisoned for their anti-war actions or words, such as 16-year-old Arseny Turbin, who was sentenced to five years in a correctional colony for “participation in a terrorist organisation”.
In May, Ukraine and Russia exchanged 1,000 prisoners of war each. But Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova – a key interlocutor in the swaps – does not work with independent human rights defenders, few of whom are still in Russia, Ponomaryov told Zhivoy Gvozd.
Moskalkova has also promoted the Kremlin’s narratives – including that the Russian armed forces are “successfully fighting neo-Nazism” – and has rejected the term “political prisoners”.
The USA on the global stage
Ponomaryov and other members of the Council of Russian Human Rights Defenders wrote an appeal in April, highlighting that human rights are not being prioritised in the current peace talks. Recognising human rights as “the necessary condition” for world peace and security was an important breakthrough of the post-World War II era, the appeal reads, referring to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The statement acknowledges how the USA has played a key role in this “movement towards progress”. But today, Ponomaryov says, “the US no longer sets an example for democracy, human rights and so on – and that is a catastrophe for the entire world”.
The Trump administration has created chaos for Russians opposing Putin abroad and reinforced the Russian leader’s position at home. At the same time, Trump’s relationship with Putin has raised a faint hope for peace.
But, even if the war ends it might not lead to the loosening of the Kremlin’s iron grip. As the human rights defenders’ appeal stresses, an unjust peace would “give a green light” to further aggression – and to even more repression in Russia.
In the face of this new reality, where the US president aligns with Putin rather than acting as a counterpower to him, there is a need for global unification. As Ponomaryov says, rights defenders across the world must come together around the issue of human rights and “start influencing what’s happening in the world arena”.
13 Aug 2025 | News and features, 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 and features, 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.
