23 May 2025 | Afghanistan, Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, El Salvador, Europe and Central Asia, Kenya, News, Palestine, Russia, Tanzania, Uganda, 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 the arrest of a human rights lawyer and how Russia has banned Amnesty International.
Detained for her work: Leading human rights lawyer arrested for supporting immigrants
Cristosal is one of the most prominent groups working to defend human rights in Central America. Over recent months, it has supported those wrongfully deported to El Salvador from the USA, and now one of its most prominent figures is paying the price for this work. Ruth López, chief legal officer in anti-corruption for Cristosal, has been arrested in El Salvador over a decade-old embezzlement accusation from when she worked in electoral courts.
Arrested late on Sunday 18 May, her family and legal team have no knowledge as to her whereabouts and are concerned about her safety. Numerous human rights organisations have come out in her defence, condemning her arrest as a violation of due process, and outlining the “environment of fear” that is prevalent in the country.
Cristosal wrote on Bluesky that Lopez is “likely the victim of short-term enforced disappearance”, constituting a “serious human rights violation under international law”. López has led multiple legal cases against the Salvadoran government, and Cristosal claims that she has been the target of smear campaigns and social media attacks coordinated by Nayib Bukele’s government, and that this is its latest attempt to silence her for her work.
No amnesty for Amnesty: Prominent human rights group banned in Russia
On Monday 19 May, Russia officially announced that it would ban the prominent human rights organisation Amnesty International from operating within the country, designating it “undesirable”. The Kremlin claims that Amnesty is the “centre of preparation of global Russophobic projects”, and that it “[justifies] the crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis”.
Amnesty has continually documented Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and the organisation has long been on Russia’s blacklist, with its website blocked and its Moscow office closed since the early days of the war. The group is far from the first to be banned by the Kremlin; since 2015 the register of “undesirable organisations” has been used to ostracise hundreds of human rights groups and media outlets. Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said that “you must be doing something right if the Kremlin bans you”, and outlined the organisation’s intentions to keep exposing Russia’s human rights violations in both Ukraine and Russia.
University protests: Student has degree revoked for pro-Palestine speech
Since Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, university campuses have become key battlegrounds in the fight for free expression in the USA. Some pro-Palestine protesters have been arrested on campus, others have been punished through suspension, and the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw funding from schools and universities that allow what it deems “illegal protests”. International students are at particular risk, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained and attempted deportations of student protesters who are in the USA on visas or green cards.
Despite the threats facing them, it appears that students are not being deterred from protesting. New York University (NYU) undergraduate Logan Rozos gave a pro-Palestine speech at his graduation ceremony last week, condemning the war in Gaza. “The genocide currently occurring is supported politically and military by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars and has been live-streamed to our phones,” he said. NYU quickly announced that the university is withholding his diploma while it pursues disciplinary action against him.
Similarly, this week, George Washington University (GWU) student Cecilia Culver criticised her university’s ties to Israel and called for students to withhold donations to GWU in a graduation speech that went viral on social media. She has since been banned from campus, with some groups calling for the withdrawal of her diploma until she apologises.
In February it was announced that a federal government taskforce set up to tackle antisemitism would be investigating events that have occurred at 10 universities, and both NYU and GWU are on this list.
Media shutdown: Taliban fires 300 from national broadcaster in mass budget cuts
As part of an initiative to cut government spending, the Taliban has fired more than 300 members of staff from the prominent national broadcaster Radio Television of Afghanistan (RTA), 91 of whom are women. Many were journalists and editors who had worked for the organisation for decades. The Afghanistan Journalists Support Organization (AJSO) believes that this is more than just a cost-cutting exercise.
In a statement on X, AJSO outlined how this continues a theme of media suppression by the Taliban, and that the decision is part of “the systematic exclusion of women from the public sphere, especially in the media”. The drive to remove women from the workplace has intensified since the Taliban regained control of the country in 2021; state-run nurseries in Kabul have reportedly seen more than 100 female staff dismissed, while hundreds of women professors have been fired from public universities across the country. At the end of last year, women were banned from training as midwives and nurses.
A 2024 UN report also outlined how the Taliban has devastated the country’s independent media landscape, with the latest cuts appearing to be a continuation of these efforts.
Freed on demand: Two activists released from detention in Tanzania following government requests
Boniface Mwangi, a prominent Kenyan activist and journalist, and Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire have reportedly been returned to their home countries following a three-day detention in Tanzania. Mwangi and Atuhaire were in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on Monday 19 May for the court case of Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu when they were arrested. They were taken into custody, with their whereabouts unknown, and allegedly denied access or contact with either their lawyers or families.
The Kenyan government publicly protested the detention, calling on Tanzania to release Mwangi in an open letter on Thursday 22 May – later that day, Mwangi was dumped on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. Mwangi has recounted his experiences in detention, claiming that he and Atuhaire were tortured while in custody. Atuhaire was also found at the border of Tanzania and Uganda, after the Ugandan High Commission wrote to Tanzania seeking information about her whereabouts. Amnesty Kenya has condemned their detentions, and has called for an independent investigation into the allegations of torture and human rights abuses by Tanzanian officials.
10 Nov 2023 | Africa, News, Tanzania, United Arab Emirates
When Tanzania’s President John Magufuli died in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, many hoped for an end to his six years of autocratic rule which saw the country’s civic space all but disappear. After Samia Hassan succeeded him, she assured the country that his authoritarian practices had died with him. Yet a crackdown on opposition to a lucrative new deal to run Dar es Salaam’s port in perpetuity and restrictions on the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) suggests otherwise.
In her inaugural policy speech after Magufuli’s death, President Hassan said: “I have heard there are media that were banned. Reopen them, we should not give them room to say we are shrinking press freedom. We should not ban the media by force. Reopen them, and we should ensure they follow the rules.”
Tanzanian journalist Ansbert Ngurumo fled to Sweden in 2017
One of those who heard Hassan’s promises was the Tanzanian journalist Ansbert Ngurumo (left), who had fled Tanzania in 2017 after getting tipped off that hitmen with orders from Magufuli to kill him had checked into the hotel where he was staying.
Speaking to Index from exile in Sweden, he said: “Journalism became a crime under Magufuli”
The omens looked good after Magufuli’s death. After being sworn into office, President Hassan, the newly celebrated “champion” of freedom of expression, seemed to act promptly on her promises. Human rights organisations, who had had their bank accounts frozen, were once again able to regain access. Onesmo Olengurumwa, director of the Human Rights Defenders Coalition of Tanzania, saw the accounts of his organisation released shortly after her announcement.
Media Council Tanzania reported a decrease in cases of arrests and harassment against journalists. It recorded 18 violations in 2022, down from 25 in 2021 and 41 in 2020. In January 2023, Hassan lifted a ban on opposition party rallies.
Yet Ngurumo says Hassan’s speech was disingenuous. “She was insisting that she was the champion of freedom of expression and free speech, whilst in the same breath putting barriers and limits to those same freedoms. Her freedom of expression is ’you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ That is not freedom of expression.”
The early optimism which followed Hassan’s rise to power was short-lived. Although the number of reported cases against journalists has decreased since Magufuli’s death, suspensions, arrests, and harassment remain commonplace.
In fact, the ghost of Magufuli still hangs over civic space in Tanzania and journalists still feel the weight of the legislation passed and enforced during Magufuli’s presidency. Laws like the 2015 Cybercrimes Act, the 2016 Media Act, and the 2018 Online Content Regulations continue to restrict freedom of expression, and create an environment of fear and self-censorship.
According to Ngurumo, “Magufuli had instilled a sense of brutality in the state organs. That spirit of brutality didn’t die with him.”
More recently, Tanzanian authorities have arrested over 20 activists protesting the most recent deal to manage Dar Es Salaam’s largest port, according to Human Rights Watch. The authorities later arrested three lawyers for holding press conferences on the port deal. Boniface Mwabukusi, Willibrod Slaa and Mdude Nyagali were held on allegations of treason before being released four days later.
The controversial deal will see Dubai Port World, a UAE-based logistics company, take over the management of Tanzania’s largest port in Dar Es Salaam. Critics are concerned by the nature of the deal, which sees DP World gain the right to manage the ports in perpetuity, whilst restricting Tanzania’s ability to change conditions of the contract.
Opposition to the DP deal has been stamped out of Tanzanian media. This most recent crackdown puts Hassan’s promises in a questionable light. Old authoritarian practices have quickly come back to haunt Tanzania at the first real threat to Hassan’s leadership.
For Ngurumo, this was just another sinister message to journalists and activists in Tanzania: “These guys were held but they were released. You see, they are just threats to remind them that the government can still do something.”
Those threats seem to be working. Under constant fear and pressure, mainstream Tanzanian media still shies away from criticising the government.
Onesmo Olengurumwa of the Human Rights Defenders Coalition of Tanzania feels that opponents to a deal for Dubai Ports World to take over Dar Es Salaam’s port fear speaking out
Olengurumwa (right) argues that publications “have that hangover and feel like they will be treated as they were under Magufuli if they speak up. So they choose to remain silent, especially the mainstream media”.
From Sweden, Ngurumo still regularly writes about Tanzanian politics in his online newspaper Sauti Kubwa which means “loud voice” in Swahili. He knows that his colleagues in the country do not have the luxury of distance.
“Right now, I don’t see media in Tanzania doing their job. I do not blame them because the laws are still very repressive.”
Ngurumo still believes there is a way out: “If one thing should be done it should be amending the existing laws. We are only afraid of the laws. If we had the right laws, we would just do our job.”
Tanzania’s civic space might be at the mercy of the fickle “goodwill” of their new President, but human rights activists like Ngurumo and Olengurumwa are working hard to restore freedom of expression in their country.
Ngurumo still advocates for engagement with the government from exile. “There is back and forth. We don’t want to have to wait until there is another president.”
In their eyes, change can only happen through engagement with the government and community empowerment. Both are part of organisations pushing for the amendment of the Magufuli laws. Olengurumwa added that “if people can see that our constitution is changing and that laws are being revised, then that will also give them the confidence in our civic space.”
Their fight to reclaim civic space after decades of authoritarianism will be hard fought. On 13 October 2023, the Tanzanian Communication Regulatory Authority issued a statement restricting the use of virtual private networks in the country, much to the dismay of human rights organisations.
In their statement, the Tanzania Digital Rights Coalition condemned the move and argued that it corresponded to “curbing freedom of expression and restricting access to unbiased information.”
It seems authoritarian habits die hard. But if President Hassan is serious about her intentions to restore civic space in Tanzania, it is only by breaking down repressive legislation and building the protection of freedom of expression into the constitution that old ghosts can finally be laid to rest.
Tanzania’s president Samia Suluhu Hassan in 2021. Photo: Paul Kagame, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
11 Oct 2022
What is the Index Index? The Index Index is a pilot project that uses innovative machine learning techniques to map the free expression landscape across the globe to gain a clearer country-by-country view of the state of free expression across academic, digital and...
24 Dec 2020 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”115942″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]2020 will undoubtedly be a year studied for generations, a year dominated by Covid-19.
A year in which 1.77 million people have died (as of this week) from a virus none of us had heard 12 months ago.
We have all lived in various stages of lockdown, some of our core human rights restricted, even in the most liberal of societies, in order to save lives.
A global recession, levels of government debt which have never been seen in peacetime in any nation.
Our lives lived more online than in the real world. If we’ve been lucky a year dominated by Netflix and boredom; if we weren’t so lucky a year dominated by the death of loved ones and the impact of long Covid.
Rather than being a year of hope this has been a year of fear. Fear of the unknown and of an illness, not an enemy.
Understandably little else has broken through the news agenda as we have followed every scientific briefing on the illness, its spread, the impact on our health services, the treatments, the vaccines, the new virus variants and the competence of our governments as they try to keep us safe.
But behind the headlines, there have been the stories of people’s actual lives. How Covid-19 changed them in every conceivable way. How some governments have used the pandemic as an opportunity to bring in new repressive measures to undermine the basic freedoms of their citizens. Of the closure of local newspapers – due to public health concerns as well as mass redundancies of journalists due to a sharp fall in revenue.
2020 wasn’t just about the pandemic though.
We saw worldwide protests as people responded under the universal banner of Black Lives Matter to the egregious murder of George Floyd.
In Hong Kong, the CCP enacted the National Security Law as a death knell to democracy and we saw protestors arrested and books removed from the public libraries – all under the guise of “security”.
The world witnessed more evidence of genocidal acts in Xinjiang province as the CCP Government continues to target the Muslim Uighur community.
In France, the world looked on in horror as Samuel Party was brutally murdered for teaching free speech to his students.
Genuine election fraud in Belarus led to mass protests, on many occasions led by women – as they sought free and fair elections rather than the sham they experienced this year.
In America, we lived and breathed the Presidential Election and witnessed the decisive victory of a new President – as Donald Trump continued to undermine the First Amendment, the free press and free and fair democracy.
In Thailand, we saw mass protests and the launch of the Milk Tea Alliance against the governments of Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan, seeking democracy in Southeast Asia.
In Egypt, the world witnessed the arrest of the staff of the EIPR for daring to brief international diplomats on the number of political prisoners currently held in Egyptian jails.
Ruhollah Zam was executed by his government for being a journalist and a human rights activist in Iran.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. From Kashmir to Tanzania to the Philippines we’ve heard report after report of horrendous attacks on our collective basic human rights. 72 years after United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we still face daily breaches in every corner of the planet.
While Index cannot support every victim or target, we can highlight those who embody the current scale of the attacks on our basic right to free expression.
Nearly everybody has experienced some form of loneliness or isolation this year. But even so we cannot imagine what it must be like to be incarcerated by your government for daring to be different, for being brave enough to use your voice, for investigating the actions of ruling party or even for studying history.
So, as we come to the end of this fateful year I urge you to send a message to one of our free speech heroes:
- Aasif Sultan, who was arrested in Kashmir after writing about the death of Buhran Waniand has been under illegal detention without charge for more than 800 days;
- Golrokh Emrahimi Iraee, jailed for writing about the practice of stoning in Iran;
- Hatice Duman, the former editor of the banned socialist newspaper Atılım, who has been in jail in Turkey since 2002;
- Khaled Drareni, the founder of the Casbah Tribune, jailed in Algeria for two years in September for ‘incitement to unarmed gathering’ simply for covering the weekly Hirak protests calling for political reform in the country;
- Loujain al-Hathloul, a women’s rights activist known for her attempts to raise awareness of the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia;
- Yuri Dmitriev, a historian being silenced by Putin in Russia for creating a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror and facing fabricated sexual assault charges.
Visit http://www.indexoncensorship.org/JailedNotForgotten to leave them a message.
Happy Christmas to you and yours and here’s to a more positive 2021.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
