22 Dec 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, Features, Letters from Afghan Women
When I was only 16 years old and in the eleventh grade at school, the previous Afghan government fell, and my life, like that of thousands of other girls, changed. I was a girl with big dreams and a passion for learning, but with the arrival of the Taliban, the doors of school were closed to me, and all the hopes I had for the future turned to darkness. But I did not give up.
Despite not attending twelfth grade, I still participated in the university entrance exam with the permission of the local Taliban. I was accepted into an English programme at a good university. However, this success did not last, as the Taliban then prohibited girls from attending university. I never stepped foot inside the university.
A few girls and I decided to protest for our right to education. During the protest, Taliban forces arrived. While the others fled, I was caught. I was in Taliban custody for four hours and was only released with guarantees from my father and brother. Those terrifying moments still haunt me.
I was then unemployed, with time on my hands. My uncle, who lived abroad, fortunately sent me money and that allowed me to enrol in a private dental institute. Except it was a similar story: I studied diligently for two years and then the institute was closed.
I experienced something else terrible: a man who was part of the Taliban, a religious student, turned my life into hell. He wanted to marry me without my consent. I was only 16 years old at the time. He would come to our house at night, threaten us, saying to my parents that “if you do not give me your daughter, I will kill you all”. One day he grabbed me by force and violently beat me on the hands and feet. This man only left my life because he apparently committed a crime in the eyes of the Taliban themselves and for that he fled the country. I constantly live in fear that he will return.
Despite all these pains and emotional wounds, I have not yet surrendered. I have even managed to find work in a dental clinic. Most patients are women because families don’t usually allow women to interact with men for examination or treatment. I prefer to work with female patients – I feel safer with them.
None of this is easy. In the environment where I live, speaking freely on the street as a woman is always accompanied by feelings of fear and concern. When I leave the house for work or errands, I am very cautious. I go about my business quietly so as not to draw anyone’s attention. I am in contact with a limited number of women who, like me, face many restrictions. We sometimes talk and share our experiences. These interactions are often done in secret and conducted with great caution.
Even so, I believe that the right to education, the right to safety, and the right to live freely have not been taken from me; they are still alive, and I must stand up to achieve them. My wish is simple: to continue my studies, live in safety and help women and girls who share a similar fate. I do not want to remain a victim; I want to raise my voice so that a path may open, not just for myself but for all girls who are gasping under the shadow of oppression.
In telling my story, I want to depict a true picture of my daily life as an Afghan woman; a woman who, under the shadow of restrictions, gender discrimination, deprivation of education and social threats, still fights to survive, learn and stand firm. This narrative is not just an account of one day, but a depiction of the sufferings that the women of my country experience every day while men, in most cases, are safe from these pressures and deprivations. At night, with a heavy heart, I close my eyes; I pray that the day will come when neither I nor any girl in this country will be a victim simply because she is a woman.
Today I want the world to know that my life is not just statistics and news; I am a human with dreams that have been buried under ashes, yet my heart still beats for hope. I want them to know that we, the girls of this land, are not just seeking rescue; we want to live; with dignity, with the right to education, with security and with dreams that, like other humans, we have the right to achieve. I want the world to know that despite all the hardships, I am still standing and I do not want to be silent. I can be a voice for girls who are no longer allowed to shout. I try as much as possible to find time to speak the truth because ultimately silence only intensifies the pain.
Editor’s note: For her safety, the woman who wrote this letter requested that we change her name.
22 Dec 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Serbia
On the second evening of my stay in Belgrade, I wondered if someone had been rummaging around in my Airbnb. I was pretty sure that I’d double-bolted the door, but when I came back from the restaurant the door wasn’t bolted at all. It was as if it had just been pulled shut. There was nothing missing, though I searched the high-ceiling-ed narrow studio flat just to make sure someone wasn’t hiding behind a curtain or in a cupboard. The apartment was empty. And I comforted myself with the thought that an intruder wouldn’t have found much anyway. I only had a small backpack, and I had decided to take my phone and laptop everywhere I went.
Belgrade is a city which induces paranoia. I’d spent the last couple of days listening to journalists and human rights defenders talking about the unknown sonic weapon used against student demonstrators in March, and about an activist who had been arbitrarily detained for hours while spyware was installed on his phone. Amnesty International reports this is common practice now, and human rights defenders I spoke to try to check their phones regularly for spyware.
The Serbian authorities are not very friendly to foreign journalists either. Tamara Filipović, the secretary general of the Independent Journalists Association told me that Croatian and Slovenian reporters had been turned away at the border in March because they were a “threat to the country”.
But even more worrying, from my point of view, was the sinister camp just a five-minute walk away from my apartment known locally as Ćaciland. I was staying in the very centre of Belgrade and Ćaciland was in the Pionirski (Pioneer) park in front of the National Assembly building, a large baroque revival edifice in the centre of the city. The encampment was the brainchild of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who had called on the Serbian people to come and defend the parliament to protect it from student demonstrators.
The students have been up in arms for more than a year marching and blockading streets and university buildings, since the collapse of a concrete canopy in the newly rebuilt Novi Sad station which killed 16 people and injured many more in November 2024. Their initial demands: an investigation into why the station was so unsafe, and the suspected government corruption around the entire building project.
As the protests became more vociferous and attracted more members of the public, Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) decided to mount a counter demonstration. People – supposedly “students who wanted to study” – were recruited from round the country to come defend the parliament ahead of the March demonstrations (which were attended by more than 300,000 anti-government protesters). At one point in the recruitment drive, a phone line was set up and a local investigative journalist from the news channel N1 rang it to find out what would happen. He was told that he would be paid between 50 and 80 euros a day to sit and lie down. Women were paid the lower rate, according to one human rights defender I met.
Human Rights House Serbia celebrates Human Rights Day despite threats. Photo: Sally Gimson
In reality, it wasn’t students who were attracted to the camp, but, according to various sources, petty, and even some more serious criminals. The camp now extends to the whole park and into the carpark in front of the parliament building. I saw white tents with music, portable toilets and swarms of police officers, there “to protect” the demonstrators. I also saw what seemed to be more disturbing elements, older men in masks and woollen hats, who I was told were likely Serbian veterans from the 1990s Balkans war. Even if they weren’t, they were dressed to suggest that. The whole place was fenced off with provisional metal railings, used the world round for crowd control. A few days before I arrived the top of the fencing had been greased and no one knew what the substance was.
I didn’t take any pictures on my phone and was warned not to peer too closely as I walked past. Last month, a television crew from N1, which is one of the few independent TV companies in the capital, was attacked by a man from the camp who turned out to be a convicted murderer. He was identified through footage recovered by the cameraman after his equipment was smashed. In July 2025 reporters filming Ćaciland had eggs thrown at them.
A journalist told me that the camp combined the dystopian aspects of Black Mirror mixed with the comedy of The Simpsons. It is called Ćaciland because when the students first started blockading universities and striking over the Novi Sad disaster, someone scrawled graffiti outside a local secondary school urging students in the town to go back to school. The graffitist spelled the word students as Ćaci instead of the correct spelling of Đaci. It led to a joke about their lack of education, hence Ćaciland (probably best rendered in English as Chavland).
The worst thing according to human rights defender Uroš Jovanović is that the police didn’t defend the attacked journalists but allowed them to act with impunity. Most prosecutors’ offices are dragging their feet when complaints are made to them. Students and journalists on the other hand have been detained and charged with “not following police instructions”. In August in some parts of the country – this is not just a Belgrade movement – demonstrations turned violent, with police beating protesters and some masked people throwing fireworks and stones.
The fight in Serbia is between students and a president they accuse of deep-seated corruption. Academics and schoolteachers have supported their students too. One human rights campaigner said that 100 secondary school teachers have been laid off because of their support, and some 25 headteachers and co-principals dismissed. Many ordinary members of the public have joined the protests, like the 50-year-old woman I met in a café who had been on the marches and started talking to me unprompted. She told me she had lived through five regimes in her lifetime and Vućić’s was by far the worse. She hoped the government would be overthrown soon.
Like Gen Zers around the world the students eschew politics, discuss actions through “forums” and have no leadership structure so they can’t be dismantled by the authorities. They organise primarily over social media. Those who have broken cover or have been arrested have found intimate pictures of themselves disseminated online and in government media. They’ve also been doxxed and smeared. Women have been particularly affected. Biljana Janjic, the executive director of FemPlatz, said out of 170 female activists they talked to, 87 had been assaulted and attacked by the police and pro-regime activists, and that sexual violence and rape threats had been normalised by the police. In smaller communities, women have been much more vulnerable to such attacks. The students’ ideology is unclear, except they dislike mainstream politics which they believe is so fundamentally corrupt that it resembles a big pot of shit – as one disillusioned politician described it – so that anyone who takes part becomes covered in excrement.
Graffiti on the HRH headquarters in Belgrade. Photo: Sally Gimson
I heard a lot about the suppression of protest and the media, not only through individual conversations, but also at the Human Rights House (HRH), just down the road from the National Assembly and the Ćaciland encampment. The front of the office has been daubed with red graffiti which covers the HRH logo: the authorities have refused to remove it for them. At least the building still rents space to the HRH Serbia team, alongside other civic society organisations.
Last week the House organised an event to celebrate Human Rights Day. The meeting was open and defiant. The leaders were mainly women. They discussed the situation in Serbia and their fears about increasing repression. Prizes were given to the director of news at N1, who HRH workers said had been vital in defending them and giving them “the courage to stay and fight”. Prizes were also given to a small group of prosecutors called Let’s Defend our Professionalism, who were praised for defending the rule of law where most of their colleagues had toed the government line. A representative from the Russian HRH in exile handed on to the director Sonja Tosković and her team the Golden Dove of Peace.
Despite their mistrust of politics and the persecution of many activists and journalists, students are organising for elections and announcing their candidates on 28 December. But there is deep tension in Serbia. Students have a history of toppling governments they don’t like. In October 2000, Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in the 1990s war, was forced from power by a student-led revolution. In Belgrade’s Museum of Yugoslavia there is an celebratory exhibition about the 20th century revolutionary socialist politician Veljko Vlahović, a former student leader, and one of the leading figures in the communist government after the Second World War. In neighbouring Bulgaria, the government was overthrown by Gen Z students this December.
I’ll never know if someone really was in my apartment, but paranoia is rife in Serbia, and all have good cause to feel that way.
19 Dec 2025 | Afghanistan, Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Belarus, Chile, China, Europe and Central Asia, Haiti, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Magazine Contents, Middle East and North Africa, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Palestine, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
Contents
12 Dec 2025 | Americas, Brazil, News
Brazilian left-wing influencer Thiago Torres, best known as Chavoso da USP (roughly translated as the University of São Paulo’s swaggy chav), has faced increasing political persecution in the last months. This reached international levels last month when Thiago’s main Instagram profile, with more than one million followers, was taken down by Meta.
Thiago then started using an old backup Instagram account with 385,000 followers, which was also taken down after allegations that it had been created to circumvent the previous block. Arbitrarily and without possibility of appeal, Meta blocked all access to his accounts and is set to permanently delete their content. A warning on Instagram said that the account “does not follow Community Standards” although the company did not specify which specific rules had been breached. Even after a preliminary injunction was issued on the morning of 20 November that forced Meta to return Thiago’s main account under threat of a fine, three other accounts were taken down later that same evening.
By maintaining the block on the influencer, Meta is involved in yet another case of big tech insubordination to Brazilian justice according to politicians. Federal Congresswoman Sâmia Bomfim, from PSOL (Freedom and Socialism Party), classified the event as a “direct attack on freedom of speech and the work of those who denounce injustices within Brazil.” Thiago sees it as “an offensive against progressive, mainly radical, left-wing voices”.
This is not the first time Meta has taken down accounts with large numbers of followers linked to the Brazilian left. In August this year, historian and influencer Jones Manoel, former candidate for governor of Pernambuco with the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party) and the Brazilian influencer with the most growth on the platform since June, was arbitrarily banned from Instagram. In October, activist and comedian Tiago Santineli also had his 850,000 followers account blocked, following online comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.
Since 9 December 2025, members of parliament from PSOL, PT (Worker’s Party), and left-wing news outlets have reported that their profiles “don’t appear in searches, can’t be tagged, and [that] their reach has plummeted in an orchestrated manner”, according to Federal Congresswoman Fernanda Melchionna. This is known as shadow-banning.
The bans follow a dispute between big tech companies and the left wing government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva which dates from January 2025, when Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office sent an extrajudicial notification to Meta because of the company’s decision to stop using independent fact-checkers. The concern was that this would further exacerbate the problem of “fake news”, which became prevalent in the 2018 and 2022 election processes, particularly on the part of the Brazilian right wing. A major dispute between the Brazilian judiciary and Elon Musk’s X also took place last year, resulting in the social network being blocked in the country until Musk complied with court orders.
The regulation of big tech companies – largely similar to what the EU has instigated – is considered by the current government as a matter of national sovereignty. In July, President Trump sent a letter to Brazil’s president, Lula, imposing a massive 50% tariff that rendered the export of a range of Brazilian products to the USA unfeasible. According to the letter, the measure came as retaliation for the sanctions against big tech and in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a representative of the Brazilian far right and ally of Trump who was convicted for attempted coup d’état.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly in September, President Lula said that “even under unprecedented attack, Brazil chose to resist and defend its democracy. There is no justification for the unilateral and arbitrary measures against our institutions and our economy. The aggression against the independence of the judiciary is unacceptable.”
It is not only in Brazil that US intervention in favour of big tech been felt. Back in January, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly stated on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast that “the US government has a role in basically defending [big tech] abroad”.
In the same week that Brazil hosted COP30 and witnessed the preventive arrest of Bolsonaro, the suspension of five accounts belonging to a left-wing influencer shows that big tech might also have a role in defending the US government’s interests abroad in Brazil.
Researchers like the Brazilian academic Walter Lippold denounce what they call “digital colonialism”, the interconnection between imperialist interests and big tech. To Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Amadeu, “online social networks and platforms controlled by big tech companies are geopolitical structures increasingly aligned with the far right.” In June, at seminars held by Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal party (PL), executives from Meta gave workshops teaching how to use AI and achieve greater reach on the platform.
Born and raised in Brasilândia, an outlying neighbourhood of São Paulo, Thiago Torres first rose to prominence as a social sciences student at the University of São Paulo.
Ranked many times as the best university in Latin America, the University of São Paulo subscribes to a national public education project aimed at social development. Despite this, USP remains elitist in the social and racial makeup of both its faculty and students. Thiago spoke about the way this composition shaped the production of knowledge within USP, and used his platform to share social theory with a wider public.
Now graduated and a teacher, Thiago has become known for denouncing cases of political corruption and police violence. Overtly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, it’s not surprising that his head is wanted by public officials and companies who benefit from the country’s social division.
In August this year, Thiago was called to testify in the controversial CPI dos Pancadões, a parliamentary commission inquiring into street funk parties. Under the pretext that they disturb public order, it is common for the military police to raid pancadões, using extreme violence and murdering the young people present, many of whom are from racial minorities and come from lower social strata.
Thiago’s account dedicated to police violence, @fim.da.pm (“End the Military Police”), is among those blocked by Meta. The company had until 28 November to return the influencer’s main account, but this didn’t happen.
“Instagram will face a daily fine for each day it fails to comply [with the judiciary decision]”, Thiago explained. “But it’s a relatively small fine for them, so it’s possible they might disregard the court order.” Unfortunately, this seems to be the case.
