8 Aug 2025 | Africa, Americas, El Salvador, Europe and Central Asia, Georgia, News and features, St. Lucia, Turkey, Uganda
Bombarded with news from all angles every day, 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 the imprisonment of a prominent Georgian journalist, and a blow to democracy in El Salvador.
A slap in the face: Georgian journalist is the country’s “first female prisoner of conscience”
Following a detention that lasted over 200 days, prominent Georgian journalist Mzia Amaglobeli has been sentenced to two years in prison in a case described by human rights groups as “disproportionate and politicised”.
Amaglobeli, founder of independent news websites Batumelebi and Netgazeti, was taking part in national protests against the disputed national election that took place in October 2024 when she was twice arrested by Georgian police – first for placing a sticker on a building, and then for allegedly assaulting a police officer. A recording of the altercation showed that Amaglobeli lightly slapped the officer before being forcefully arrested, and her lawyers have stated that she was verbally abused and denied access to water following her arrest.
She has been recognised as the first female prisoner of conscience in a country where democracy and free speech have rapidly crumbled. While her initial charge of assault was downgraded to “resisting or using violence against a law enforcement officer”, her two-year sentence has been condemned by the EU, with a spokesperson denouncing the “instrumentalisation of the justice system as a tool of repression against independent voices”. Numerous rights groups have called for her release, with the Committee to Protect Journalists describing the sentence as “outrageous” and “emblematic of Georgia’s increasing use of authoritarian tactics” against independent media in the country.
President Nayib Bukele here to stay: El Salvador abolishes presidential term limits
On Friday 1 August, El Salvadoran Congress voted 57-3 to abolish presidential term limits, allowing President Nayib Bukele to potentially serve for life. Following the announcement, opposition congresswoman Marcela Villatoro announced that “democracy in El Salvador has died”.
Bukele, who has described himself as the “world’s coolest dictator”, has garnered significant popular support since coming to power in 2019, with an approval rating of over 80%. This is largely due to his intense crackdown on the gang violence that has plagued the Central American nation. In 2022 he announced a “state of exception” allowing the government to arrest tens of thousands without due process. This practice has led to close to 2% of the nation’s population being incarcerated.
There may, however, be another side to the crackdown. In May, Independent Salvadoran news site El Faro released an interview with a gang leader who reportedly struck deals with Bukele to help the 44-year-old rise to power. Shortly after, numerous journalists at El Faro were forced to flee the country under threat of arrest. They are far from the only targets of Bukele’s administration; at least 40 journalists have been forced to flee El Salvador since May because of threats from the government. The country’s leading human rights group Cristosal decided in July to completely relocate following the arrest of Ruth López, Cristosal’s chief legal anti-corruption officer.
Human rights groups are alarmed about the swift deterioration of press freedom in El Salvador – but with Bukele’s popularity still sky-high and his party controlling 90% of seats in congress, he appears unassailable.
The crime of speaking up: Turkish youth activist detained over Council of Europe speech
On 5 August, Turkish youth and LGBTQ+ activist Enes Hocaoğulları was detained upon arrival at Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport over a speech he gave at a Council of Europe (COE) meeting in Strasbourg.
Hocaoğulları, who is Turkey’s youth delegate to the COE’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, gave a speech in March titled “Young people in Turkey say ‘Enough’” in which he railed against police brutality, crackdowns on dissent, and the imprisonment of opposition politicians such as Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was arrested earlier that month. Following his address, Hocaoğulları was subject to a targeted smear campaign branding him as a “traitor” who seeks to “spread LGBTI+ ideology”.
Hocaoğulları faces charges of “publicly disseminating misleading information” and “inciting hatred and enmity”, charges that “flout the fundamental right to free expression”, according to COE’s congress president Marc Cools. The COE previously expressed concern over the Turkish Government’s attacks on democracy after the arrest of İmamoğlu, who intends to challenge Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2028 elections. The COE have called for Hocaoğulları’s immediate release, describing his arrest as “scandalous and unacceptable”.
A step in the right direction: St Lucia strikes down colonial-era anti-LGBTQ+ law
In a landmark judgement, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court has ruled that St. Lucia’s colonial-era “buggery”and “gross indecency” laws outlawing consensual same-sex relations are unconstitutional.
Previously, engaging in intercourse with a member of the same sex was punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Although the law was rarely enforced, Human Rights Watch have detailed how such laws imposed under British colonial rule allow for discrimination in employment and healthcare, creating a “climate of fear” for LGBTQ+ communities who felt they could not report homophobic abuse to the authorities. The court held that criminalisation of homosexual conduct results in “public humiliation, vilification and even physical attacks” on LGBTQ+ individuals.
St. Lucia is the latest Caribbean nation to repeal colonial-era anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, following in the footsteps of Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados, among others. However, many of its neighbours still hold on to these laws, with Trinidad and Tobago & St. Vincent and the Grenadines recently voting to uphold repressive legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people.
Jailed for a TikTok: Ugandan university student imprisoned for posting TikTok critical of the president
Ugandan university student Elson Tumwine, who went missing for over a month after posting a TikTok criticising Ugandan President Yowerei Museveni, has been sentenced to two months imprisonment.
Tumwine, a third-year student at Makerere University in Uganda’s capital Kampala, posted a video accusing Museveni of being responsible for the 1989 Mukura massacre, allegedly doctoring a clip of parliamentary speaker Anita Among to make these claims. He was working as an agricultural intern in Hoima, western Uganda, when he disappeared, causing Makerere University to issue an urgent appeal for his whereabouts. Secretary-general of opposition NUP party David Lewis Rubongoya claimed to have information that Tumwine was dumped at a police station on 13 July after being subjected to “incredible torture” by military intelligence units.
The prosecution stated that the TikTok was intended “to ridicule, demean and incite hostility” against Museveni and Among, and charged Tumwine with offensive communication and computer misuse. In court he swiftly pled guilty, resulting in a more lenient sentence than expected. although local reports allege that he may have done so under pressure from security operatives.
Tumwine is the latest Ugandan to face charges over videos critical of the government on social media, with the Ugandan e-paper Monitor stating he is the sixth TikToker to be imprisoned in the country for “offensive communication”. Emmanuel Nabugodi, was jailed for 32 months in November 2024 for “insulting” Museveni in a TikTok, while Edward Awebwa faced 24 months on similar charges in July 2024.
29 Nov 2024 | Azerbaijan, News and features
The protester had only been shouting for a few seconds before he was grabbed by a man in black and dragged to the ground. Determined, he got back up and continued.
If you paid enough attention at COP29, you could see these black-suited men carefully patrolling the corridors of Baku’s Olympic Stadium. Like me, many activists covering the United Nations’ flagship environment conference in Azerbaijan, believed them to be state security services. The altercation happened in COP’s “Blue Zone”, which is under the authority of the United Nations and used for networking, private meetings, side events and press conferences of accredited participants.
Shouting at the top of his lungs, the protester criticised untenable working conditions and low pay for service workers at COP29. A crowd quickly gathered, phones and cameras in the air, filming the tussle. From behind their screens, many journalists urged the man in black to let go of the protester, and demanded to see this shadowy figure’s identification. The man in black refused and pushed his way through the cameras to rejoin a group of men talking into earpieces. The protester, who later identified himself as Ismail Jafarsoy, was eventually escorted out by UN security. His fate now that COP has finished is uncertain.
The incident confirmed the uneasy mood of the UN’s flagship climate conference. In Azerbaijan, speaking out of turn, whether on environmental or labour issues, is frowned upon at best and met with jail time for some.
Azerbaijani economist Gubad Ibadoghlu, a professor at the London School of Economics, was detained on 23 July 2023 on fabricated charges during a visit to the country to see his family. He is currently in the Kurdakhani detention centre and Amnesty International has raised concerns over his deteriorating health since his arrest.
In April this year, human rights and climate activist Anar Mammadli was arrested by the Azerbaijani authorities on bogus charges of conspiracy to unlawfully bring money into the country. Critics of the government say he was arrested for setting up the Climate of Justice Initiative in February, which used Azerbaijan’s hosting of COP to draw attention to the climate crisis. Mammadli faces eight years in jail.
Civil society groups and youth activists arriving at COP were given extensive security briefings. Those who attended these briefings told me that they lasted about an hour and they had to put their phones in another room and on airplane mode. They were told that their phones could be listening to them, and that they should never utter the word “Azerbaijan” or the name of its president Ilham Aliyev within the venue. Activists became used to having photos of them or their phone screens taken by people in the venue for no legitimate reason. Unsettled by this, they started to take photos of these surreptitious photographers in return, circulating them within their group chats like “wanted” posters.
The atmosphere created self-censorship among activists, who feared endangering their colleagues and friends if they spoke out against the Azerbaijani government. Despite the blatant abuses of power on behalf of the COP presidency, such as withholding key drafts during the negotiation process, activists preferred to target the Global North instead, for their equally dangerous lack of ambition in climate finance negotiation. But Azerbaijan meanwhile, was to be kept off lips.
One of the best publicity stunts at COP, hosted by a coalition of climate organisations, is “fossil of the day”, a satirical prize which rewards countries who are the best at doing the least on climate change, and who generally block or hinder negotiations. Azerbaijan was a clear contender and yet, the prize’s judges told me, their nomination was withheld until the very last day in fear of retaliation.
In the busy corridors of COP, I met Javid Gara, one of the few Azerbaijani activists present at the conference. We sat by one of the many pre-approved protests going on until Gara pointed at some men in black and said “let’s move”.
Gara is a climate activist from Azerbaijan, based in the UK. He campaigns against deforestation in the country, which lost 447 hectares of natural forest in 2023. Javid talked about the suspicion and paranoia in his homeland, where the crackdown on journalists drastically intensified after Azerbaijan was announced as the host of COP29. He told me that the regime has since become unpredictable, arresting people you would never expect. “We’ve got to the point where people are suspicious if you haven’t been arrested,” he said.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev has two weapons: activists, journalists and politicians are either arbitrarily arrested on trumped-up charges of money laundering or drug trafficking, or are tied down with an oppressive and restrictive law that regulates non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Under this law, organisations are unable to receive foreign funding, and instead have to rely on government funds which limit their activities. In response, NGOs must either risk operating independently under immense budgetary pressure, or are forced to adapt their activities away from political or human rights based activism and toward less “provocative” topics such as environmental or agricultural issues. Many have been forced to flee and live in exile.
Emin Huseynov is one of many Azerbaijani human rights activists living in exile. After almost a year of hiding in the Swiss embassy in Baku, Huseynov managed to escape to Switzerland aboard a diplomatic jet. Shortly after reaching Switzerland, where he now lives and is in the process of seeking political asylum, he was stripped of his Azerbaijani citizenship. In July 2023, the European Court of Human Rights found the Azerbaijani government in violation of his rights and ordered them to reinstate his citizenship. He remains stateless to this day.
Huseynov continues to raise awareness of the blatant abuses of Aliyev’s regime, and to highlight the persistent attempts to whitewash his government through international cultural and political events, such as the Eurovision song contest or COP29. For his Climate Observers Partnership campaign, Huseynov bought the domain name COP29.host and made a website highlighting the repression of Aliyev’s regime. Access to the website was soon blocked by the Azerbaijani authorities.
As Huseynov told me, if the world needs finance to save a dying planet, so too do activists for Azerbaijan’s dying civil society. According to him, the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East have made it harder to find funding from abroad. Both exiled and domestic activists are finding themselves financially forced out of their advocacy. “We have funds to keep us going until the end of November, after that, I don’t know what will happen,” he said.
In the halls of the Baku Olympic stadium, Javid Gara explained how he is determined to keep fighting for his country’s biodiversity despite the restrictions he faces. Refusing to risk government control, Gara’s organisation Ecofront has no funds, no offices, and no staff. “Our operational capacities are so restricted, we don’t have a choice, we have to stay voluntary,” he said.
Today, there are 319 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Activists both inside and outside of the country are exposed to surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment and even assassination. In the weeks preceding COP29, a political opponent of the regime, Vidadi Isgandarli, was stabbed to death in his home in France. He was believed to be the fourth Azerbaijani activist in exile to have been murdered since 2021, according to Le Monde. Countries with such abhorrent human rights records should not be the hosts of climate conferences when so much is at stake.
Whether it be through the song and dance of Eurovision or the tense COP29 negotiations, Aliyev’s regime is desperate to cover up its abuses in glam and glitter. But attention should bring accountability, and the international community must make sure that while the president basks in the spotlight, he does not extend his dangerous grip in the shadows.
