25 Jul 2025 | Africa, Americas, El Salvador, Kenya, Malawi, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United States
In the age of online information, it can feel harder than ever to stay informed. As we get bombarded with news from all angles, important stories can easily pass us by. To help you cut through the noise, every Friday Index publishes a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression. This week, we look at how a human rights group has been forced out of their country, and how the White House faces backlash for banning a popular news outlet.
Human rights on the run: Activists critical of Nayib Bukele forced to flee El Salvador
After 25 years of activism, Cristosal, the most prominent human rights group in El Salvador, has made the decision to relocate its staff and operations out of the country following increasing threats and targeting by the Salvadoran government.
Cristosal had been at odds with President Nayib Bukele’s government for years. The group was at the forefront of critics within the country over the wrongful deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador from the US and has compiled alleged evidence of torture and corruption within Bukele’s government. But tensions have escalated as El Salvador has forged a strong alliance with the USA under Donald Trump. Executive director of Cristosal Noah Bullock stated that repression against journalists and activists has escalated in the last two months, and that the arrest of Ruth López, Cristosal’s chief legal officer in anti-corruption was the tipping point that pushed them to flee.
López, held in the Izalco prison in the west of El Salvador, is now the only Cristosal employee remaining in the country where it was founded; the group ensured that all staff were safely out of the country before making the announcement out of fear of Bukele’s response. It follows an increasing trend of journalists and activists fleeing the Central American country – at least 40 journalists have relocated since May, alongside over 60 lawyers and activists, due to police harassment, surveillance, and threats of arrest. Cristosal will continue to cover human rights abuses in El Salvador from exile in neighbouring countries Guatemala and Honduras.
Getting the boot: White House bars Wall Street Journal from Trump’s Scotland trip
The White House has come under fire for barring The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) from joining the media entourage covering Donald Trump’s trip to Scotland following a controversial report regarding Trump and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The article contained a description of a letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for the disgraced financier’s 50th birthday, including a drawing of a naked woman and allegedly including the quote “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denied ever writing the letter, and reportedly threatened to sue WSJ if they released the article. US press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated WSJ were kicked from the press pool due to “fake and defamatory conduct”.
A spokesperson for rival newspaper New York Times has condemned the decision, dubbing it “an attack on core constitutional principles underpinning free speech and a free press“, while the White House Correspondents Association’s president Weijia Jiang stated that it should “concern all who value free speech and an independent media”. It is merely the latest incident of the Trump administration cracking down on media organisations; in February the White House revoked the Associated Press’s access to presidential events after it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America” as Trump had decreed.
A tipping point: BBC joins media orgs in statement on Gaza starvation
The BBC have released a joint statement with Agence France-Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and Reuters expressing concern over the rapidly increasing threat of starvation to their journalists reporting from Gaza.
International journalists are currently barred by Israel from entering the Gaza Strip, meaning that the only reporters on the ground are local Palestinian journalists, who are as affected by the ongoing conflict as civilians. The statement reads, “For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.”
It follows an AFP statement calling for Israel to allow its freelance journalists to leave Gaza, reporting that they had been forced to cut back on their coverage of the conflict due to starvation; one journalist said, “we have no energy left due to hunger”. This aligns with widespread reports that the famine in Gaza is reaching unprecedented levels due to Israeli forces blocking aid into the country. The chief of the World Health Organization stated that Gaza is suffering “man-made mass starvation”, and over 100 humanitarian groups released a joint statement detailing the “intense famine” faced across Gaza. Israeli government spokesman David Mencer refuted this, telling Sky News that “There is no famine in Gaza”, and that all food shortages had been “engineered by Hamas”.
A step in the right direction: Malawi decriminalises defamation
In a landmark judgement regarded as a huge step towards press freedom for the south-east African nation, Malawi has ruled that criminal defamation is unconstitutional, stating that it was a “disproportionate and unjustifiable limitation on constitutional freedom”.
The judgement came as part of a case concerning Malawian social media influencer Joshua Chisa Mbele, who challenged Section 200 of the Penal Code – the section criminalising defamation – after charges were brought against him for comments he had made regarding a public official. The Malawi chapter of Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) described the case as “a landmark victory for freedom of expression”.
The law had allowed those found guilty of defamation to face criminal sanctions, such as steep fines and imprisonment. The court ruled arbitrary interpretations of the law and the fear of reprisal harming public discourse meant that the law violated constitutional rights regarding free speech. However, true press freedom in Malawi remains distant: publishing “false news” can be met with up to two years in jail, while the “unauthorised transmitting of data” can be met with up to five years’ imprisonment.
A swift U-turn: Terror charges against Kenyan activist dropped after backlash
Notable Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi was arrested on 19 July 2025, accused of “facilitation of terrorist acts” during the widespread protests that have shaken Kenya over the last two months. His arrest sparked outrage across the country and worldwide, with rights groups denouncing the charges raised against him and #FreeBonifaceMwangi going viral on social media. Now, the terror charges have been dropped, in place of the lesser charge of the illegal possession of ammunition without a licence.
Investigators reportedly searched his home and office, seizing personal devices such as a laptop, notebooks and two unused teargas canisters. The search warrant used by the police also allegedly accused Mwangi of paying “goons” to incite the protests, a claim that Mwangi denies. He stated outside court 21 July that he has never worked with “goons” and that “people hate [Kenyan President William] Ruto for free.”
Mwangi is often involved in protests, and has been detained a number of times. In May, he and Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire were detained and allegedly tortured following a protest in Tanzania before being dumped at the borders of their respective countries. Recent protests in Kenya have been met with intense repression, with Ruto ordering officials to shoot demonstrators in the leg to ensure they are incapacitated but not killed – nevertheless, 65 people are reported to have died in protests since unrest began on 12 June.
25 Jul 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, 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.
On a hot June evening in London’s Bloomsbury earlier this summer, there was standing room only to hear the American historian Benjamin Nathans talk about the Soviet dissident tradition. Perhaps the audience at Pushkin House, the UK’s oldest independent Russian cultural centre, was drawn by the author’s new-found celebrity – the result of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize he has been awarded for his 800-page history of the dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. Whatever the reason for so many people being there, they were treated to a masterclass in storytelling. After detailing the struggles of a tiny network of writers, scientists and academics against the authoritarian Soviet regime, Nathans turned to the subject of Donald Trump’s America.
“We are in a state of war,” he said. “We are in a state of war with our own government, and this is a war that’s going to last at least several years. The sooner that people understand that, as far as I’m concerned, the better. We need to be on a war footing.”
Nathans is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution based in Philadelphia, who has made his reputation through careful and nuanced analysis of Russian and Jewish history. His comments on US politics were delivered in the same calm and measured tone as his answers on Soviet intellectuals in the middle years of the 20th century.
Although “UPenn” is not on the frontline of attacks from the Trump administration, like Harvard and Columbia, it has been threatened with significant funding cuts – a $175 million embargo on research. Its offence? Five years ago, the university allowed the trans athlete Lia Thomas to participate in the women’s swimming team.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this decision, at the time Thomas met the requirements of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) to swim on the women’s team. Nathans elaborated: “So what the White House is essentially saying is, you obey the law five years ago, but we changed the law three months ago, and now we’re going to go after you retroactively for having violated our version of the law.” University of Pennsylvania is suing the government to block this action, but Nathans recognised that the Trump administration has a whole armoury of measures up its sleeve: stripping the university of its nonprofit status, taxing its endowment, or blocking the recruitment of foreign students, to name a few.
Beginning the fightback
Initially shellshocked, those opposed to the attacks on American civil society, including universities, are finally fighting back, said Nathans. “I know a lot of people in Europe have been dismayed at the lack of protest, at least until [14 June] with the ‘No Kings’ Day’, which produced a tremendous turnout in dozens and dozens of American cities. I participated in several quite modest-sized protests against these threatened funding cuts, against the demand by the administration that they have a say in our admissions policy, that they have a say in our hiring policies, things that just so egregiously cross the line of state interference.”
It would seem the global expert on dissidents is himself becoming a dissident in his own land. However, Nathans believes Trump and his allies are not mistaken in their view that American universities are hotbeds of left-liberal thinking.
“The reason why this war started with the Trump administration is that they view American universities as factories that produce Democrats. And they’re not wrong,” he said. In case anyone in the audience doubted him, Nathans repeated himself for emphasis: “They are not wrong. 95% of my department identifies with the Democratic Party. You have to look really hard to find a Republican in the humanities at a place like Penn.
“In general, there is a very clear, powerful correlation between higher education and voting Democratic – the more degrees people get, the more likely they are to vote for a Democratic candidate. Now, correlation is not causation, but as they say in the social sciences, it’s a good place to start.
“Republicans say, you know, why are we giving so much money to these institutions that just produce Democratic voter after Democratic voter? They concluded at some point that we are unreformable, that they cannot break the chokehold that left-of-centre academics have on the Academy.
“And so, what they’re going to do is break the institutions themselves, and that is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to destroy these institutions so that they can remake them in a very different mould. It’s a war, in other words.”
The end of the Ivy League?
On a slightly more positive note, the historian said he didn’t believe the present US government would succeed in its mission to crush the USA’s elite universities, but he felt it would do a lot of damage on the way.
Intriguingly, there is a strategy at the heart of the dissident movement that may serve those fighting the Trump regime well. In the opening chapters of his book, Nathans describes the thinking of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, an eccentric mathematician and poet, who developed an ingenious method of resistance. For figures like Volpin and those around him, the old ways of the revolutionaries, such as mass demonstrations and underground cells, seemed outdated and associated with the romantic myth-making of the regime they opposed.
Volpin despised the “lingering romance with revolution as the paradigmatic form of historical change”. Instead, he suggested holding the Soviet government to the literal meaning of the 1936 Stalin-era constitution, which guaranteed free expression and open justice. In the 1960s, he developed the concept of the “glasnost meeting”, where people would gather to demand adherence to the law by the authorities. Glasnost translates to “openness” or “transparency”.
This “law-based dissent” was tested first at the glasnost meeting of 5 December 1965 in Pushkin Square, led by Volpin. It was designed symbolically to coincide with Constitution Day under the watchful eye of Russia’s late national poet Alexander Pushkin, the author of Ode to Liberty.
When Nathans was writing the conclusion to his epic work in the summer of 2023, his first thought was how it would carry in translation in Russia. He never imagined that it would take on a resonance in the USA. Now, he believes the parallels are real and that lessons can be learnt: “The dissident legal strategy can serve to highlight the really fundamental role that American courts are playing in resistance to Trump. And it’s a mixed picture, to be sure, but a lot of the imperial overreach that we’re experiencing now from this administration is being pushed back by the courts saying, ‘No, you can’t expel people from the country without due process. No, you can’t withhold money from a university and threaten to take over its hiring procedures’.”
Disdain for the law
The consequences of these judicial rulings are still unclear, and Trump, like his Soviet predecessors, is not overly concerned with obeying the law. But Nathans said there was inspiration to be drawn from law-based dissent along with other dissident strategies. “The legal strategy and the ability to destroy the Soviet government’s monopoly on the flow of information in the form of samizdat (censored and underground publications) and the radio broadcasts that brought it to millions of Soviet listeners – there is an echo of that in the situation in the United States today. It’s the courts and the press that are the front lines.”
It was also possible, said Nathans, that the legalistic approach coupled with a robust media might ultimately prove more effective than a traditional protest movement. “It’s very hard to measure the impact of public protests. The numbers are impressive. The diversity of the crowds is impressive. But how do you translate that into political outcomes? Whereas judicial rulings and the transparency that good journalism forces on a regime, those are things that you can really measure. So, I do think there are lessons to be learned from this story.” Nathans has referred to the “radical civil obedience” of Soviet dissidents and it is not difficult to see the correlation with Trump’s America.
It is no longer fanciful or hyperbolic to characterise Trump as an authoritarian leader. What he hinted at in his first term, he has delivered in his second. In a matter of months, he has dismantled the structures of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within state-funded institutions and thousands of people have been fired from their jobs. Political activists have had their visas revoked and dozens of universities have been investigated.
On the research side, cuts to funding have forced labs to shut down and university departments to lay off staff. There is now a real possibility of a brain drain in American academia. Meanwhile, civil society organisations have faced threats over their tax-exempt status. The crackdown on the media has included the White House taking control of the press pool that covers presidential events, and the defunding of broadcasters such as National Public Radio, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Challenging the American state
The concept of the “American dissident” is already gaining currency in intellectual circles. In April 2025, Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer published a New Yorker weekend essay entitled So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump’s Age of Fear. Angwin, a respected investigative journalist and Fields-Meyer, a White House senior policy adviser from 2021 to 2024, warned that “the consequences of challenging the state seem to increasingly carry real danger”. While recognising that there had always been retribution for those who took on the American state, this felt different.
“The fear now is different in kind,” they said. “The sweeping scope of Trump’s appetite for institutionalised retaliation has changed the threat landscape for everyone, almost overnight. In a country with a centuries-long culture of free expression, the punishments for those who express even the slightest opposition to the administration have been a shock to the American system.”
Angwin and Fields-Meyer also cited To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause and Nathans’ concept of “radical civil obedience” as a potential source of inspiration for Trump’s opposition. “An affirmative vision of what the world should be is the inspiration for many of those who, in these tempestuous early months of Trump 2.0, have taken meaningful risks – acts of American dissent.”
In December 2024, four months after Nathans’ book was published, The Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman was quick to recognise its saliency for contemporary America. In an article entitled A Mindset for Trump’s America, Beckerman picked up on another dissident strategy expressed best by Andrei Amalrik, the author best known for his provocative 1970 essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Writing later of his fellow dissidents, Amalrik said:
“They did something simple to the point of genius. In an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”
Never normalise
Ultimately, the dissident mindset is the radical refusal to accept institutional untruth. It is the denial of denial. Whether embodied in Václav Havel, the former dissident who became President of Czechoslovakia, or Alexei Navalny, who died at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s neo-Stalinist regime, dissidents are people who, like George Washington, cannot tell a lie.
“What dissidents teach us is not to normalise,” said Beckerman. “Just look at the Republican Party’s radically shifting attitudes about Trump to understand how easily this can happen. Leaders who were once worried enough to publicly call the former and future president out as a ‘reprehensible’ (JD Vance) ‘con artist’ (Marco Rubio) who had ‘discredited the American experiment with self-governance’ (Robert F Kennedy Jr) are now his closest advisers and legitimisers.”
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause has taken on an almost mythic status in Trump’s America and its author rightly won the Pushkin House Book Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction writing in English on Russia, to go with the Pulitzer Prize.
The title of Nathans’ book is a reference to the ironic toast dissidents made to each other in the dark days of the Cold War. The American dissident cause must sometimes seem equally hopeless in the face of the USA’s first authoritarian president. Donald Trump has often been described as a “pathological liar”. It is entirely appropriate then that his opponents should take inspiration from Alexander Esenin-Volpin, the man who the great Russian dissident and fierce Putin critic Vladimir Bukovsky described as “pathologically honest”.
24 Jul 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United Kingdom
It is a time of “firsts” in the UK – the first time a superinjunction has been deployed by the government and the first time a direct-action group has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation primarily on the grounds of property damage. Both examples have impacted freedom of expression and both show how laws in the UK – created with particular and legitimate purposes in mind – can be too broad and too ill-defined to protect our speech rights.
Let’s start with the superinjunction. Last week it was revealed that one was used to prevent the public from knowing about how thousands of Afghans were relocated to the UK after data about their work with British forces was leaked online. This placed them in extreme danger and the government spent hundreds of millions trying to correct course. Before the High Court decision on Tuesday, journalists were banned from disclosing anything about the leak, or even the fact that an injunction existed.
The length of the proceedings made the case a first too. According to court documents the Ministry of Defence originally asked for the superinjunction to last around four months, back in September 2023. By the time the superinjunction was lifted, two years had passed.
Furthermore, the superinjunction was made “against the world”, not just against named media organisations, meaning that any third parties who became aware of the proceedings were gagged. Mr Justice Chamberlain, the judge who oversaw most of the proceedings, had said that granting the superinjunction to the government “is likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship,” adding: “This is corrosive of the public’s trust in government.”
It has also only been a few weeks since Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation, with three weekends in a row seeing protesters arrested for expressing their support of the group. When Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed PA, it was noted as unprecedented, the first time an organisation that mainly targets property has been proscribed. Lisa Smart MP said in the parliamentary debate ahead of the proscription that “while there may be compelling legal arguments that the actions of Palestine Action have met the legal definition of terrorism in terms of serious criminal damage… there are still questions as to whether that discretion is proportionate in this case, given the level of threat posed to the general public.” As many argued, and irrespective of what one might think about PA and their tactics, we already have laws to criminalise their more aggressive and destructive ones.
The two cases are of course very different in nature, but both raise important questions about how fit for purpose some legislation in the UK is and how their applications can be oppressive.
In terms of the superinjunction, the procedure was created by the 1998 Human Rights Act. It was intended to balance protection of individuals’ privacy against protection of freedom of expression. The balance however was noted as off from the get-go and that the existence of superinjunctions would act as a serious threat to media freedom. We at Index were against them, except in exceptional circumstances, and recognised the risk of not defining what would qualify as an exceptional circumstance. Today, because of their very nature, we don’t actually know how many are in place and what stories we are missing. What we can say is that the Afghan story was of huge public significance. It concerned thousands of people and billions of taxpayer money and yet was shielded from public debate. Was suppression of the story necessary to protect the security of those impacted, which should absolutely be taken very seriously? The time lag in the leak happening and it being acknowledged would suggest damage had already been done. Was it necessary for the gag order to go on for so long? It’s hard to see that it was.
As for PA, they were proscribed under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Someone who expresses support for them is now committing an offence and can face up to 14 years in jail, hence the series of arrests we’ve already seen. Their proscription also carries with it implications for freedom of expression that goes beyond being part of the organisation or directly supporting them. According to Section 12 of the Terrorism Act someone may be criminalised for being reckless in their speech supporting them in reference to how that speech is interpreted by those who hear it. Lawyers and human rights organisations have argued that such wording is too broad and too ill-defined, that it could be easily misapplied.
These are not abstract concerns. Last week, for example, police in Canterbury threatened a woman with arrest for using the phrase “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”, making a tenuous link between his speech and PA. In another instance a man was arrested for carrying a placard featuring a Private Eye parody of the proscription. Add to these examples legitimate fears that many others will self-censor to remain fully within the law.
The Labour government has just rounded off their first year in power. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the past government have “serious questions to answer” in terms of how the breach and the superinjunction happened. It’s heartening to see that it’s being taken seriously and we can only hope that as they review the leak they too review whether superinjunctions fulfil anything useful in the UK, or at least will consider how the definitions around when they can be used could be better defined. At the same time it’s the Labour government who proposed the proscription of PA. We’re concerned we’re only at the start of seeing its free speech implications.
As Labour enter their second year in power, a commitment to freedom of expression would be welcomed. Addressing how appropriate versus oppressive the framing of some of our existing laws are would be welcomed.
24 Jul 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, 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 about the issue here.
When Diala Ayesh was arrested last year, her first thought wasn’t for her own safety – it was whether anyone would inform her loved ones of her whereabouts.
“Even though there was nothing against me, as Palestinians we always expect to leave home and not return,” she told Index.
On 17 January 2024, Ayesh was travelling north from Hebron to Ramallah via public transport when the vehicle was stopped by Israeli forces at Wadi a-Nar – a military checkpoint near Bethlehem. After the border police inspected everyone’s ID cards, a female officer asked: “Who is Diala?”
“I am,” Ayesh answered.
Before anything could happen, Ayesh leaned over and whispered to the woman sitting next to her: “If they take me, tell my family.”
Ayesh was pulled from the vehicle and beaten. The driver’s keys were returned, and they were told to drive on without her.
She was told she was being detained, and the police officer asked her whether she had links to Hamas. “These were ready-made questions with no evidence, as if just being Palestinian is accusation enough,” said Ayesh.
Over the next few hours, she was transferred from one military camp to another. At one point, she was placed in a metal container outdoors in the winter cold for six hours. She was blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back and officers banged on the bars of the cell to scare her. She was eventually transferred to Hasharon prison, where she was strip-searched and left in a “cold, filthy” cell, with no food or water.
The next day, she was transferred to Damon Prison, and placed with other female prisoners. It was the first time she had eaten since her arrest.
“When I was arrested, I felt frozen in time,” she said. “At first, I had emotional numbness, I couldn’t think or feel. That quickly turned into fear. And then, I felt I had to turn that fear into strength. I kept comforting myself, telling myself: ‘I am the strong one’.”
On 25 January 2024, she was issued with a four-month administrative detention order without charge or trial, and she did not appear before a court, aside from what she described as a “sham” court hearing held via video conference. She spent nearly a year in Damon Prison until she was eventually released on 14 January this year.
The human rights lawyer spoke to Index over a Signal video call from her home in Ramallah, intermingling English with Arabic, then later via email with the help of a translation tool. She was warm, relaxed, jovial, dressed in a stripy top and vaping, sat next to her younger sister who helped her translate into English. She spoke openly about her harrowing year in jail.
She endured unbearable conditions which she says had a “significant negative impact” on her mental and physical health. A report from the NGO Euro-Med Monitor has noted how conditions inside Israeli jails have seen an “unprecedented deterioration” since the start of the war in Gaza.
Ayesh said she received little medical care in Damon, despite developing severe stomach pain. After being released, she visited a doctor and needed to have her gall bladder removed.
“[The doctor said] if I had waited one more week, something bad would have happened,” she said.
Alongside facing strip-searches, beatings, solitary confinement and being deprived of family visits, Ayesh said she was denied basic necessities such as sanitary pads. Radios, TVs, games and books were confiscated, and prisoners were prevented from practising religious rituals and had their hijabs taken away.
“These became part of our daily reality. It wasn’t just an attempt to break our bodies but to crush our dignity and humanity.”
Ayesh described a “deliberate and systematic policy of starvation”. Meals consisted mainly of beans, chickpeas, lentils and toast. Boiled eggs were cooked once a week then reheated throughout the week, turning blue and emitting an “unbearable smell”.
But the worst part for her was the intellectual suppression.
“We couldn’t even hold a pen. This was a strategic move to suffocate us intellectually and emotionally – as if the goal was to kill the consciousness within us before anything else.”
Her detention order was renewed several times before her release. Every time, she was tried in a “sham court”, she said, where she would attend virtually via video call. These took place in a military rather than a civilian court – a practice previously described as a “discriminatory” judicial system by Sahar Francis, director of the Palestinian NGO Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. Ayesh said parts of the sessions were conducted in secret between the judge and the prosecution, and the decision to extend her detention was based on “secret evidence” that was not shared with her or her lawyer.
I asked her if she ever lost hope. “There’s a saying we often repeat: ‘The prison door never truly closes on anyone’,” she said. “I truly believed that freedom would come, no matter how long it took.”
Her greatest source of anxiety was for her family’s welfare, not her own. Every time her detention neared its end she would get anxious and cry, ready to learn her fate but also wondering whether her family would be waiting for her nervously at a checkpoint.
The other women prisoners were her sole source of comfort, and “became like family” to her. “They did their best to lift my spirits,” she said. “They never left me to face it alone, and that love was my greatest source of strength.”
To date, neither Ayesh nor her lawyers have been given a reason for her year-long detention.
The 29-year-old lawyer has defended political prisoners detained in both Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israeli jails. She won Index’s Freedom of Expression Award for Campaigning last year for her bravery and dedication to free speech.
Ayesh spent nearly a year in Damon Prison in Israel, enduring grim conditions and what she describes as a “deliberate and systematic policy of starvation”. Here, she reunites with her parents after her release in January 2025
She was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Ramallah, where she has lived her whole life. She is the oldest sibling and lives with her parents, three sisters and brother. Her grandparents were displaced during the 1948 Nakba from Jerusalem and Gaza to Ramallah and Al-Bireh in the West Bank.
While she describes her childhood as normal “compared with other Palestinian children”, it was far from ordinary. In 2000, when she was six, the second intifada – a major uprising by Palestinians against Israel – broke out, and Ramallah was at the centre of clashes. Tanks would pass through the streets she played in, the army would frequently come to her home and the sound of explosions were part of everyday life.
“We learned to distinguish between live and rubber bullets, between gas and sound bombs,” she said.
She never consciously decided to become a human rights lawyer – but perhaps her childhood experiences drove her down that career path.
“There’s nothing more painful than witnessing injustice and staying silent,” she said. “I believed my role was not just to practise law but to use it as a tool to confront oppression and restore dignity [to people].”
In her final year of law at Al-Quds University, in Palestine, she attended a court session at Ofer Prison, an Israeli jail housing Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. She was conscious of the irony that some of the officers she was speaking to “might one day arrest me, or someone close to me”.
In 2018, she started defending political prisoners held in PA prisons in the West Bank, providing them with legal consultations and advice, speaking to their families, documenting their conditions and representing them in court.
Three years later, after her uncle was sent to an Israeli jail, she began work with Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons as well.
Her last visit to an Israeli jail was three days before her own detention, and she has not been able to continue that work since her release due to security restrictions.
Ayesh’s professional work has suffered because of her imprisonment – her family had to shut down her law office and she has been given a travel ban. She has managed to resume some work with detainees in PA jails.
But she has long endured intimidation on all fronts. Before her arrest, she was subjected to threats and harassment from the PA “almost on a daily basis”, she said.
This included online trolling, getting direct threats from people affiliated with the Palestinian security services, receiving warning messages via prisoners, and near-constant surveillance. A Palestinian intelligence agency car would often park outside her home for long periods of time.
“This was clearly meant to send a message: ‘You are being watched’,” she said. Israeli forces would also send her frightening anonymous phone messages.
In July 2021, Ayesh was arrested by the PA during a crackdown on a peaceful protest outside its police headquarters in east Ramallah. She was not attending the protest but was visiting the police station with a group of human rights defenders to advocate for the release of detainees being held there. During her arrest, she said she was sexually and physically assaulted by five police officers, who beat her on her breasts and buttocks.
But she has not been deterred. “These threats did not silence me or stop me – they made me more determined to continue defending human rights. When someone is threatened for their activism, it means they’re hitting a nerve somewhere, and their work is making an impact.”
Indeed, she has much work to do. Since 7 October 2023, repression of free speech has ramped up in the West Bank, and journalists, lawyers and cultural workers have all been increasingly subjected to imprisonment, harassment and attacks.
“Both the occupation and the Palestinian Authority impose tools to control the public sphere and break any dissenting voices,” she said.
Aside from judicial punishment, these include online and physical surveillance, threats to political prisoners’ families, and Israeli authorities increasing travel restrictions or terminating permits for Palestinians working in Israel.
“Many Palestinian people in the West Bank have been arrested or subjected to mistreatment simply for participating in a demonstration or sit-in, or even for writing a simple post on social media,” Ayesh added.
In her final year of studying law at Al-Quds University in Palestine, Ayesh attended a court session at Ofer Prison, an Israeli jail housing Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. Although she was attending in a professional capacity, she was aware that Israeli officers might one day arrest her
Indeed, after her release, the first case she worked on was a university student who was arrested by the Palestinian security services for attending a sit-in at Al-Manara Square in Ramallah.
Since her release, Ayesh has been brave enough to speak to the media about the mistreatment of prisoners, but has been “filled with internal fear” for doing so.
Many female prisoners released from Israeli jails have been directly threatened and told not to speak to the media, she said.
Last year, the UN called for an end to the “prolonged administrative detention without charge” of human rights defenders in the West Bank by the Israeli authorities.
In July 2024, Mary Lawlor, UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, drew attention to five individuals who were arrested and detained between October 2023 and March 2024, of which Ayesh was one.
Others included Bassem Tamimi, an organiser of peaceful protests against the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and Baraa Odeh, a campaigner for young people’s rights. All five had been arrested without warrants, interrogated without the presence of lawyers, and denied contact with their families.
“Everything has changed since 7 October,” Ayesh said. “Now anyone who opens their mouth will get arrested. Anyone who crosses a checkpoint, they [Israeli authorities] can check your phones; if you share anything about Gaza, Jerusalem or things happening in the West Bank, they can arrest or hurt you. If you are posting [online] for your job as a journalist, they can kill you.”
Since the Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Ayesh has been impacted in more ways than one. Seven members of her extended family have died, and life in the West Bank has grown arduous, with more military checkpoints, curtailed freedom of movement and increased repression.
Meanwhile, monitoring the abysmal conditions faced by Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails has become increasingly difficult, with legal due process suspended and access to lawyers restricted. It was this lack of due process that meant Ayesh herself was stripped of her right to a fair trial during her detention.
For all these reasons, Ayesh believes she cannot give up her work. Continuing to be a lawyer is risky – but when human rights violations are so rampant, she feels she has no other option.
“I can take a rest, but I can’t stop my work. This is the situation [I am in] and after I was released, I told myself that I can still help. I am not afraid.”
She used to regularly attend peaceful marches in Ramallah, but now she is worried about being arrested again. She knows she must be careful – for her clients’ sakes as well as her own.
“I must stay safe to help more people. Out of prison, I can play a great role. In prison, I can do nothing.”
All photos by Diala Ayesh.
