26 Sep 2025 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Syria
In the upscale Damascus neighbourhood of Al-Adawi, a blue metal door bears a sign reading: “The One Room Theatre.”
The entrance feels unwelcoming. The adjacent garden is frozen in time, suggesting abandonment. This impression deepens beyond the threshold – a cluttered “waiting room” overflows with scattered cassette tapes, faded playbills, film posters and yellowed newspaper clippings haphazardly pinned to walls and windows.
Dominating the wall in the theatre room, is a photo of identical twins, Mohamad and Ahmad Malas. Over 15 years ago, they dreamed of entering Syria’s theatrical scene. Rejected by state institutions that dismissed their vision, they converted a room in their family home into an intimate theatre. Small in size, vast in ambition.
Militias in support of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had occupied the house at some point during the Syrian civil war, according to Mohamad Malas, but family relatives later expelled them.
“When the regime fell last December we rushed back from a Jordan film festival,” he told Index. “Returning home was painful – the house stood looted and empty. Its soul has gone.”
Ahmad Malas recalls writing plays with his brother in 2009, inspired by their studies at a private Damascus theatre institute.
Under Assad’s rule, addressing direct political topics was forbidden, so they crafted humanist stories with whispered political undertones. After the Directorate of Theatres repeatedly ignored their licensing requests, they launched the underground One Room Theatre.
They hosted three plays, the last of which was staged shortly after Syria’s revolution began.
As protests surged, the twins joined the uprising personally, not only through art. Arrests and security threats followed, forcing them to flee Syria in late 2011. Heartbroken, they locked their theatre door. Months later, their family abandoned the home and headed to Saudi Arabia, leaving it silent.
The Malas Brothers drifted through Lebanon, Egypt and finally France, where they pursued theatre in Arabic and French. One play, The Two Refugees, serendipitously reached Damascus in late 2024.
On their return, the twins deliberately left the waiting room’s chaos untouched – tapes strewn, posters peeling. Their only change was to move the theatre to a sunlit balcony near the kitchen due to Syria’s chronic power cuts. At 4pm, natural light frames their play All Shame Upon You.
Photo by Mawada Bahah
Mohamad Malas explained that the play, staged 20 times post-Arab Spring but paused in Syria, now features rewrites “we’d never dare perform before liberation”.
The performance unfolds on a crumbling sofa “stage” before low chairs. It follows two opposites sharing a flat: a heartbroken intellectual whose lover married during his imprisonment, and a crude soldier dreaming of martyrdom-for-glory. Their clashes blend rage, dancing and tears, culminating in the soldier forcing the poet to call his lost love.
The Culture Ministry has promised support – unlike the pre-revolution era when security agents monitored every show. Yet the twins remain pragmatic.
“The theatre in Syria doesn’t pay for bread,” Mohamad Malas said, adding that he and his brother will split time between France (to earn a living) and Syria (to follow their passion).
Their French passports offer global protection but “mean nothing in Syria,” he added. “If a French passport serves me better, our country is still on the wrong path.”
In their last show on 5 June, before they returned to France, the Malas brothers cautiously pushed boundaries, hinting at identity-based killings on Syria’s coast earlier this year.
In March, hundreds of minority Alawite civilians in coastal cities were killed by Sunni fighters, according to Reuters news agency reporting and several monitoring groups. Assad belonged to the Alawite sect, and the massacre came after a rebellion by remaining Assad loyalists, that ended in bloodshed.
The attacks took place only three months after Assad’s ousting in December ended his brutal rule and followed almost 14 years of civil war.
“Freedom isn’t just criticising the past regime,” Mohamad Malas said.
A pivotal line lingers in his play: “Was the homeland worth all this suffering?” When asked, Ahmad Malas admitted: “Sometimes, no, not after children died in Daraya, Ghouta… then again on the coast after the revolution.”
Despite Syria’s wounds, they harbour hope: “Mistakes happened, but awareness and law can heal rage.”
But despite the gloomy theme of the play, the Malas brothers struggle to hide their joy. The reason is that they’re finally able to stage work without censors hiding in the audience.
30 May 2025 | Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Russia, Samoa, Uganda, United Kingdom, Venezuela
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 a controversial new monument to an infamous dictator, and Uganda’s “state-sanctioned bigotry”.
A tribute to repression?: Moscow unveils new Stalin statue in subway station
At the Taganskaya metro station in central Moscow, a controversial new monument has been revealed: a life-sized figure of Joseph Stalin, perhaps the most infamous and brutal of Soviet Russia’s dictators, amongst a crowd of adoring citizens. He stands before St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower, with a banner to his predecessor Vladimir Lenin unfurled above his head.
A monument to a leader who executed nearly 800,000 people, whilst millions more died in prison work camps known as Gulags and from famine under his reign, is of course highly controversial. The display has been dubbed a “gift” to the people who travel Moscow’s metro, and opinions have been firmly split amongst citizens – bouquets of red carnations adorn the feet of Stalin, left by those who look back fondly on the man who industrialised the Soviet Union, while others, such as members of Russia’s liberal Yabloko party, have protested the installation of a homage to “a tyrant and a dictator”, describing the statue as “an act of mockery against the descendants of the repressed”.
Should such a monument be permitted? To many, Stalin symbolises decades of brutality, repression, fear and censorship, and many have raised concerns that honouring him in this way embraces a history of violence at a time when Russia is waging an aggressive war in Ukraine. But some Russians see the monument as a memorial to a man who shaped much of their nation’s history. Artistic expression must be protected and history, including its horrors, must not be forgotten. However, ironically, when protesters left a poster on the monument displaying quotes from Vladimir Putin previously condemning Stalin, it was quickly removed, and one of the activists was detained, somewhat undermining the notion of artistic agency.
State-sanctioned bigotry: Human Rights Watch report condemns Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws
International NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has issued a damning report detailing how the Ugandan government has consistently repressed and restricted LGBTQ+ people throughout the reign of president Yoweri Museveni, particularly since the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in May 2023.
Uganda has been described as having the world’s harshest anti-gay laws, and the report reinforces this notion. The report details the 2023 act’s egregious punishments, which include the death penalty for “serial offenders” of “aggravated homosexuality”, and life imprisonment for same-sex conduct. It also enforced censorship, making any advocacy or discussion of LGBTQ+ rights punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
HRW reported a surge in threats towards LGBTQ+ Ugandans over the past two years, due to a targeted effort by Ugandan politicians to spread misinformation and shape public discourse against the LGBTQ+ community. Oryem Nyeko, senior Africa researcher at HRW, stated that Uganda must “end its assault on LGBT people and choose a future of dignity, equality, and freedom for all those who live there.”
The dangers of defamation: Samoa urged to repeal defamation law that silences journalists
On 1 May 2025, Samoan journalist Lagi Keresoma published an article alleging that a former police officer had appealed to the Head of State to have charges against him removed, reported to be forgery charges regarding a loan application. Just over two weeks later, Keresoma, head of the Journalists Association of (Western) Samoa (JAWS), was arrested and charged with defamation under a law which has long drawn international scrutiny.
Samoa’s harsh criminal libel law was previously repealed, but was reintroduced in 2017 with harsher penalties, and has since been weaponised against critical and investigative reporting. JAWS has stated that the case represents “a troubling development for press freedom in Samoa”, and that the defamation charges could be perceived as “an abuse of power to suppress public scrutiny and dissent.”
The country treats defamation as a criminal rather than a civil matter, something which the UN Human Rights Committee has warned against. Samoa has fallen significantly in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index, from 22 in 2024 to 44 in 2025.
Arbitrary detention: UN rules that Alaa Abd el-Fattah is being held illegally in Egypt
Following an 18-month investigation, an independent UN panel has found that the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah is illegally detained in Cairo, and has called on the Egyptian government to release him immediately.
Detained since 2019, el-Fattah was sentenced to five years in prison in 2021, convicted of spreading false news and harming Egypt’s national interests. Amnesty International described the verdict as a “travesty of justice”. Since September 2024, his mother Laila Souief, who is based in London, has been on hunger strike to protest his detention. She was admitted to hospital this week, marking the second time she has been hospitalised since February.
Many leading figures have called on the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) to issue warnings against travelling to the north African country, with former British ambassador to Egypt John Casson describing the country as a “police state” in a letter to The Times. He said that British citizens in the country “cannot expect fair process, nor normal support from the British government”, and that “Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s case is not isolated.” UK prime minister Keir Starmer has called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi twice, urging for el-Fattah’s release, but no movement has yet been seen regarding the fate of one of Egypt’s most prominent writers.
An uncontested victory: Maduro make big gains in elections as opposition parties boycott
On 25 May, Venezuela’s regional and parliamentary elections took place, but the ballot papers were notably barren. Nicolás Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s (PSUV) stormed to victory in 23 out of 24 states. However, it was largely uncontested, due to a decision by the majority of opposition parties to boycott the vote in protest at last year’s presidential election, the results of which were proven to have been falsified.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado was a leading voice in the boycott campaign, stating that the true results of the 2024 presidential election must be adhered to before any other vote. In a video posted earlier this month, she announced that “We voted on 28 July. On 25 May, we won’t vote.” Venezuela’s electoral council claimed that the turnout was above 40%, but have neglected to post the election results online as was standard practice before 2024, with the pollster Meganálisis claiming turnout was actually around 14%.
Not all opposition members agreed with the boycott; former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles continued to campaign and urged Venezuelans to vote, arguing that by not voting, “all you’re doing is making things easier for the government.” But it seems that regardless of the outcome, Maduro would have clung on to power – and now, with an overwhelming majority in government and an ever-increasing crackdown on political dissidents, the future of both free speech and fair elections in Venezuela looks bleak.
28 Mar 2025 | Belarus, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Russia
On Sunday 30 March, I and mothers like me across the UK, will be waking up to a chorus of “Happy Mother’s Day!”, handmade cards and flowers thrust in our faces as we curse whoever made the decision to put the clocks forward on today of all days.
As anyone who is a mother knows, it’s a hard job. The balancing of family life, careers and – dare I say it – our own social lives; the emotional and mental load that falls to us; attempting to raise tiny people into well-rounded grown-up humans.
Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise all this, in ourselves and in our own mothers. But this Mother’s Day, I’d like to think about those who are mothering in extreme situations. Those who are fighting for the release of their children, who are held in prison in autocratic regimes after raising their voices. Those who are campaigning for the release of partners, after they stood up to autocrats. And those who are behind bars themselves after speaking out, and have been ripped away from their families.
One of those mothers is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for president against Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2020 in Belarus. She is now in exile in Lithuania, where she leads the opposition coalition.
Tsikhanouskaya never wanted to be a politician. She describes herself as having been an “ordinary woman”, where her family was her world. The change of course was thrust upon her when her husband Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was a willing opposition leader, was arrested in May 2020 then sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021.
With her husband incommunicado, Tsikhanouskaya has led the campaign for his release, taken up his political reins and continued to raise their two children.
On Belarus Freedom Day (25 March), just a few days before Mother’s Day, Lukashenka chose the national awareness day to be sworn in after his sham election. Meanwhile, Index on Censorship organised a protest outside the Belarusian embassy in London, writing the names of political prisoners in chalk on the pavement. Meanwhile, Tsikhanouskaya continued to raise the issue of Belarusian freedom on the international stage. From her office in Lithuania, she took time out to talk to me about what happens when the worlds of motherhood and campaigning collide.
“Raising children is a heavy duty, even if you’re an ordinary person,” she told me. And for her, there is an additional toll.
“You always live with the feeling of guilt, because you are not spending enough time with the children,” she said. A relatable feeling. “Very unexpectedly for them, I became […] the person who is defending their daddy, who is defending the country, the leader that had to travel a lot just to raise the alarm about the situation in Belarus.”
She tries to pack in time with her children when she can, but is conscious of not overwhelming them.
“All these years, we are also living with the pain,” she said. Her daughter was only four when her father was imprisoned, and Tsikhanouskaya does everything she can to make sure she remembers his voice and what he looks like. Her daughter writes letters, but they go unanswered.
“It’s very painful for her, and she’s asking, ‘Mum, maybe he is not alive anymore, and you are lying to us, or maybe he doesn’t love us anymore’,” she said.
Tsikhanouskaya is forced to have conversations with her children that no mother would ever want to conduct, about brutality and torture in prisons. Meanwhile her son, who is older, tries not to ask painful questions. He doesn’t want to write letters to his father, because he doesn’t want to flaunt his own freedom.
“I hope, I really believe that they’re learning a lot from these difficult lives. They’re learning how people can sacrifice their lives, their freedoms, a comfortable life, just for something bigger and more important,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Beyond this, she said she feels the Belarusian people are learning something – that women can lead movements. This, she said, is not the message that was left to them from their Soviet Union past. Meanwhile, she is nourished by the Belarusian people, and by international communities.
This Mother’s Day, Tsikhanouskaya has a message for other mothers fighting similar battles: “Don’t even dare blame yourself that you are a bad mother because you have to be a good leader of your campaign. Your example is the best lesson your children can learn.”
She spares a thought too for the mothers who are political prisoners themselves, and describes how this tactic of separating mothers from their children is “like they cut a piece of your life”.
One of those women is Antanina Kanavalava, a member of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign, who was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for preparing to take part in a mass riot, related to her role in running a Telegram channel. Her husband was also detained for the same reason, leaving behind their son and daughter, who are both under the age of eight and were taken abroad by their grandmother.
“Dictators know that children are the most effective leverage,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
In fact, Tsikhanouskaya herself had her children used against her. She was told to leave the country, and was threatened with prison if she refused.
She said that she was told: “Your husband’s already in prison. Your children will be in an orphanage.”
The winner of the Trustees Award at our Freedom of Expression Awards in 2024 also knows what it means to campaign for your husband’s release while continuing to raise children. Russian human rights activist Evgenia Kara-Murza, the advocacy director of the Free Russia Foundation, continued to raise her three children while she took up the campaign to fight for her husband’s release.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested and jailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2022, after he’d already been poisoned twice. His wife spent the next two years travelling the world and speaking out against her husband’s imprisonment and Putin’s regime. In August 2024, he was finally freed as part of a prisoner exchange.
In Turkey, the Saturday Mothers have held sit-in vigils in Istanbul since 1995, for loved ones who have been forcibly disappeared or murdered. They have spent more than 1,000 Saturdays conducting peaceful demonstrations. After their 700th vigil in August 2018, they faced a crackdown, their peaceful protest broken up with tear gas, water cannons and arrests. Finally in March 2025, 45 members of the Saturday Mothers who had been arrested were acquitted.
Elsewhere in Turkey in 2024, mothers of Crimean political prisoners held a series of exhibitions called I Will Always Wait For You, My Child, demonstrating how their lives had been devastated by the Russian occupation of Crimea. Photos and captions were displayed on easels and online, each with the photo of a mother whose child was ripped away from her, detained and taken to Russia.
The exhibition was supported by Ukrainian NGO Human Rights Centre ZMINA, the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey, and the Crimean Tatar diaspora.
“My children are my air. I will fight for them until my last breath,” wrote Dilyara Abdullaeva, a 70-year-old mother whose sons Uzeir and Teymur were sentenced to 12.5 and 16.5 years in a strict regime colony.
On the UK’s shores, Laila Soueif has been putting her life at risk for her son, British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
El-Fattah has been in and out of prison in Egypt for the last decade, after becoming a vocal pro-democracy campaigner. When his most recent sentence of five years came to an end last September, he was not released. His mother went on a hunger strike for the next five months, and was eventually told by doctors that her life was at risk.
When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer finally made a call to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in February this year, she switched to a partial hunger strike, to give the negotiation process time to take its course.
Soueif spoke to me over a video call this week, and she described herself as “functioning”.
“I realised that both the Egyptian and the British government are not going [to act], except when there is a crisis. So, I decided to create the crisis,” she said.
While in the past she has felt enthusiastic about campaigning, albeit sometimes exhausted and bored by the situation, since September she has felt very angry.
Soueif’s hunger strike lasted an incredibly long time before she deteriorated, but she doesn’t think that what she has done is particularly extraordinary.
“I really believe that most mothers would be willing to take that kind of risk for their kids,” she said. She is probably right. Regardless, it’s a position no mother wishes to be in.
A hunger strike was not Soueif’s first port of call. She had taken legal routes, staged demonstrations and spoken to the British government.
“In the end, none of it worked,” she said.
She is now worried she made the wrong choice coming off her hunger strike, as the momentum seems to have been lost. She is considering taking it up again, and can only hope there are motions of clemency from the Egyptian government around the end of Ramadan in a few days’ time. If she does go back on a hunger strike, she will be putting herself at huge risk.
Her message to other mothers fighting for their loved ones is this: “If you start a fight, don’t give up. Because however hard the fight is, to give up without achieving your objective will probably be much, much harder.”
In this fight, she has never been alone. She spoke about the incredible solidarity she has had, and the difference it has made.
From exile in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya acknowledged that mothers like herself need some time, care and a listening ear too. While she fights for freedom in Belarus, she also continues to be an ordinary woman.
“Save yourself first, and then go and ruin dictatorships,” she said.
Mothers, even when they’re not fighting autocrats, have incredible strength and resilience. Perhaps, as some of these women show, it is the mothers who will get dissidents out of prison, and take down oppressive regimes.
3 Mar 2025 | Americas, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Newsletters, United Kingdom, United States
It would have been difficult to miss the recent flurry of news regarding cuts to international aid organisations, and the repercussions these will have in areas such as climate change mitigation, tackling gender-based violence, and supporting independent journalism in countries with severe free speech violations.
Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID (the US Agency for International Development) will decimate such assistance, with more than 90% of the agency’s foreign aid contracts due to be eliminated. As the world’s largest supporter of independent foreign media until now, Trump’s decision is perilous at a time when democracy and impartial reporting are being eroded globally.
This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer also announced that the UK’s international aid budget would be slashed to better fund defence, a move that mirrors the USA’s insular approach and appears to be driven by the increasing threat of estrangement from the country. While charities and backbenchers have expressed serious concerns, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has said that although the decision to cut aid is “devastating”, the Cabinet is “united that the number one responsibility of any government is to keep its citizens safe”. Not entirely united, it would seem – this morning, the International Development Minister Anneliese Dodds resigned over it.
But declarations of citizen safety are questionable, given the government does not currently appear to be keeping its citizens very safe abroad. This week, 43-year-old British-Egyptian political prisoner and pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah was in the news again, as his UK-based mother Laila Soueif has been hospitalised by a hunger strike she began nearly five months ago. Doctors have warned that her life is at risk, but she is refusing glucose treatment until Starmer calls Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to secure her son’s release.
The Labour government’s approach to the situation has so far been tepid. While Foreign Secretary David Lammy visited Egypt in January to discuss trade deals, economic growth and illegal migration, he was ultimately not able to reach a resolution on Abd el-Fattah’s case. Starmer has publicly committed to do all he can to secure his release, and has written to the Egyptian president twice but reportedly has been unable to have a phone call with him about it. Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, said in a statement this week: “Keir Starmer has to make this call today. Every moment that he waits means that my mother is more likely to die.”
The thread tying both international aid cuts and lack of consular assistance together is one of isolationism. According to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, the UK’s aid projects countering threats to democracy, journalism and human rights totalled £1.37bn between 2015 and 2021, but since then budget cuts and an increased fear of damaging relations with other governments have impeded this work. Recent developments do not spell good news for those subjected to human rights violations globally, and as Abd el-Fattah’s case indicates, British citizens are not exempt from this risk. We now need to see strong actions from the UK government that it is willing to speak out against such violations and do its utmost to support democratic principles.
