Contents – Land of the Free? Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad

25 Jul 2025 | Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, DR Congo, Georgia, Guatemala, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Magazine Contents, Malawi, Nigeria, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025, Zimbabwe

Contents

Has the USA, the so-called Land of the Free, become a dangerous country for those who question its government?

Such a notion is, of course, in opposition to the country’s founding principles. Enshrined in the 1791 First Amendment to the US Constitution are citizens’ fundamental freedoms – including freedom of religion, speech, the press, protest and petition. Conveniently glossing over its dark history of colonisation and slavery (whi=ch would continue for nearly a century after the First Amendment was ratified), it signified the USA as a global bastion of democracy, equality and civilised values. Now, Trump appears to be metaphorically setting fire to the paper these principles are written on.

This is having profound impacts within the USA and around the world. Trump was inaugurated for his second term only six months ago, but already he has sought to deport people for their views on Israel and Palestine; threatened universities with eye-watering financial sanctions if they do not adhere to his ideological viewpoints; slashed the budgets of state-funded broadcasters; deployed the National Guard to police protests, a tactic used by military dictatorships; and dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), stopping the work of human rights groups globally.

In this edition, we explore these attacks on free speech at home and abroad.

Up Front

The American Nightmare: Sarah Dawood
Fundamental freedoms are being rapidly dismantled in the “land of liberty”

The Index: Mark Stimpson
A close look at upcoming elections, El Salvador and the attitudes of US border agents

Features

The forgotten Caucasus conflict: JP O’Malley
With journalism restricted, it’s not easy to get to the truth about Azerbaijan and Armenia

Attacked on all fronts in the West Bank: Sarah Dawood
A human rights lawyer who has seen Israeli prisons from the inside

Is this how it is in Somalia?: Abdalle Ahmed Mumin
Journalists criticising the government take their lives in their hands

“People are terrified to speak their minds”: Ruth Green
From a questionable offer of a Georgian literature award comes the perfect opportunity to speak out

The plight of Boualem Sansal: Clemence Manyukwe
Algeria’s answer to Orwell has found himself in a dystopian situation

Reporters branded as traitors: Margaux Blanchard
Telling the truth has become a dangerous act in Guatemala

Climate protest feels the chill: Sally Gimson
Just Stop Oil go on one final outing before hanging up their orange t-shirts

The forgotten Syrians: Mawada Bahah
Assad might have fallen, but hundreds of his critics are still locked up in Lebanon

Going underground in beijing: Murong Xuecun
Singing on the subway can quickly become an act of dissent

From protest to social post: Tiléwa Kazeem
Nigerians are taking to TikTok to voice their frustrations

Special Report: Land of the Free? - Trump's war on speech at home and abroad

American dissident: Martin Bright
Lessons in resistance from those who have been here before

Trump’s first days under scrutiny: Mark Stimpson
A whirlwind of executive orders, and the real impact for free expression

Radio silence: Rebecca L Root
Left without funding, Radio Free Asia is fighting to stay on the airwaves

Borrowing from Erdoğan’s playbook: Kaya Genç
Culture wars in the USA meet culture wars in Turkey

The war on truth: Maksym Filipenko
A new comic from a Ukrainian artist gets to the heart of US interests

Silence is survival in Haiti: Gabriella Jóźwiak
The withdrawal of USAID has left press freedom in tatters

Good news for tyrants: Danson Kahyana
Is the suspension of USAID empowering African dictators?

Land of the litigious bullies: Nik Williams
A road trip across the home of strategic lawsuits that stifle dissent

The rise of the newsfluencer: Liam Scott
Falsehoods, conspiracies and a place in the press pool

Why the UK needs to step up on international aid: Emily Couch
Freedom and human rights are being deprioritised

Befriending the Kremlin: Alexandra Domenech
When Trump and Putin cosy up, there are consequences for the world

An un-American story: Katie Dancey-Downs
Control the books, control the narrative

No power to the people: Mackenzie Argent
US universities have become battlegrounds for free speech

Comment

What we all lose when we lose LGBTQ+ rights: Matthew Beard
Hungary’s Pride event went ahead despite a ban but other spaces for freedom are shrinking

Votes for men?: Raina Lipsitz
It might be time to get the Suffragette banners out of storage

Democratic backsliding: Jemimah Steinfeld
The UK’s free speech record is shaky – but US right-wingers are looking in the wrong place

Lost in translation: Clive Priddle
The era of a less diverse USA, where international literature is turned away

Culture

Goodness Gracious Me in the age of Trump: Salil Tripathi
A new (and unofficial) scene from the hit comedy sketch show pits India against the USA

Documenting Ukraine’s war has a deadly cost: Victoria Amelina, Mark Stimpson
An exclusive extract from the war diary of a writer killed by Russia

The trouble with love: Keletso Thobega
A new anthology paints a picture of queer activism in Africa

A silent life under the Taliban: Sarah Dawood, Barin
When Afghan women are forbidden from speaking, one author writes regardless

Hamilton star on freedom’s fragility: Giles Terera
Taking centre stage to have the last word

Contents – The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system

9 Apr 2025 | Afghanistan, Botswana, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Iran, Israel, Magazine Contents, Palestine, Russia, Slovakia, Somalia, Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Volume 54.01 Spring 2025

Contents

Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. Before Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccination in 1796, infectious diseases and viruses killed millions. The introduction of anaesthetic gases during surgical procedures in 1846 eliminated the excruciating pain of surgery. And before Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, people died unnecessarily from cuts and grazes.

But the benefits of modern medicine are not felt equally around the world. In this issue, we explore the forgotten patients in global healthcare settings – the marginalised groups who fall through the cracks or are actively shut out of healthcare provision, then ignored or silenced when they raise concerns.

Just like free speech, healthcare is an indisputable human right. But for many around the globe, both these rights are being removed in conjunction with each other. Through telling their stories, this edition aims to shine a light on these injustices and – we hope – empower more people to speak up for the right to health for themselves and others.

Up Front

A bitter pill to swallow: Sarah Dawood
Not all healthcare is made equal, and pointing this out can have serious consequences

The Index: Mark Stimpson
From elections in Romania to breaking encryption in the UK: a tour of the world’s most pressing free expression issues

Features

Rape, reputation and little recourse: Samridhi Kapoor, Hanan Zaffar
Indian universities have a sexual violence problem that no one is talking about

Georgian nightmare: Ruth Green
Russian-style laws are shutting down more conversations in Georgia, with academia feeling the heat

Botswana’s new era: Clemence Manyukwe
From brave lawyer to president – could the country’s new leader put human rights front and centre?

Venezuela’s prison problem: Catherine Ellis
The disputed new president has a way of dealing with critics – locking them up

Forbidden words: Salil Tripathi
The Satanic Verses is back in India’s bookshops. Or is it?

The art of resistance: Alessandra Bajec
A film, a graffiti archive and a stage play: three works changing the narrative in Tunisia

A tragic renaissance: Emily Couch
The pen is getting mightier and mightier in Ukraine

In the red zone: Alexandra Domenech
Conscription is just one of the fears of an LGBTQ+ visual artist in Russia

Demokratia dismantled: Georgios Samaras
The legacy of the Predator spyware scandal has left a dark stain on Greece

Elon musk’s year on X: Mark Stimpson
The biggest mystery about Musk: when does he sleep?

Keyboard warriors: Laura O’Connor
A band of women are fighting oppression in Myanmar through digital activism

Behind the bars of Saydnaya prison: Laura Silvia Battaglia
Unspeakable horrors unfolded at Syria’s most notorious prison, and now its survivors tell their stories

Painting a truer picture: Natalie Skowlund
Street art in one Colombian city has been sanitised beyond recognition

The reporting black hole: Fasil Aregay
Ethiopian journalists are allowed to report on new street lights, and little else

Special Report: The forgotten patients - Lost voices in the global healthcare system

Whistleblowing in an empty room: Martin Bright
Failures in England’s maternity services are shrouded in secrecy

An epidemic of corruption: Danson Kahyana
The Ugandan healthcare system is on its knees, but what does that matter to the rich and powerful?

Left speechless: Sarah Dawood
The horrors of war are leaving children in Gaza unable to speak

Speaking up to end the cut: Hinda Abdi Mohamoud
In Somalia, fighting against female genital mutilation comes at a high price

Doctors under attack: Kaya Genç
Turkey’s president is politicising healthcare, and medics are in the crosshairs

Denial of healthcare is censoring political prisoners – often permanently: Rishabh Jain, Alexandra Domenech, Danson Kahyana
Another page in the authoritarian playbook: deny medical treatment to jailed dissidents

The silent killer: Mackenzie Argent
A hurdle for many people using the UK’s National Health Service: institutional racism

Czechoslovakia’s haunting legacy: Katie Dancey-Downs
Roma women went into hospitals to give birth, and came out infertile

An inconvenient truth: Ella Pawlik
While Covid vaccines saved millions of lives, those with adverse reactions have been ignored

Punished for raising standards: Esther Adepetun
From misuse of money to misdirecting medicines, Nigerian healthcare is rife with corruption

Nowhere to turn: Zahra Joya
Life as they know it has been destroyed for women in Afghanistan, and healthcare provision is no different

Emergency in the children’s ward: Shaylim Castro Valderrama
The last thing parents of sick children expect is threats from militia

Comment

We need to talk about Sudan: Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Would “a battle of narratives” give the war more attention?

RFK Jr could be a disaster for American healthcare: Mark Honigsbaum
An anti-vaxxer has got US lives in his hands

The diamond age of death threats: Jemimah Steinfeld
When violent behaviour becomes business as usual

Free speech v the right to a fair trial: Gill Phillips
Are contempt of court laws fit for the digital age?

Culture

An unjust trial: Ariel Dorfman
A new short story imagines a kangaroo court of nightmares, where victims become defendants

Remember the past to save the future: Sarah Dawood, Diane Fahey
Published exclusively, the issues of antisemitism and colonialism are recorded through poetry

Where it’s more dangerous to carry a camera than a gun: Antonia Langford
A singer meets filmmakers in Yemen, and both take risks to tell her story

The fight for change isn’t straightforward: Shani Dhanda
The Last Word, on exclusion and intersectional discrimination

Contents – Unsung heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression

17 Dec 2024 | Afghanistan, Argentina, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Georgia, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Magazine Contents, Music, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024

Contents

Music has been described as a “cultural universal” – a practice found in all known human cultures and societies. While anthropologists still scratch their heads over exactly where the concept originated, evidence indicates that humans have used musical instruments for an astonishing 40,000 years.

During an excavation in 1995 in Slovenia, researchers discovered a bear’s femur bone with holes in it and concluded that it could be an ancient flute.
Humans have always found ingenious ways to make music, and it’s not difficult to see why. It is one of the most powerful forms of self-expression, capable of eliciting both intense happiness and sadness in the listener. It is used to celebrate, lament, respect and enrage, and its endless genres, styles and instruments form a core part of countries’ unique cultural heritages.

But despite its universality, music is being silenced globally. Religious extremism, political factions, racism and nationalism are all driving forces, stopping it being performed, produced and listened to. In this issue we explore how music bans have been weaponised to silence communities and erase histories.

Up Front

Songs of defiance: Sarah Dawood
How ever much authoritarians try to turn down the volume, musicians will play on

The Index: Mark Stimpson
Moments that matter in the free speech world, from US disinformation to a democracy void in Belarus

Features

Adding insult to injury: Nour El Din Ismail
Turkey is not always welcoming to Syrian journalists

Waiting for the worst: Alexandra Domenech
A daring few Russian politicians are staying put

Somalia’s muzzled media: Hinda Abdi Mohamoud
The challenge of seeking out the truth in the face of daily risks

Further into the information void: Winthrop Rodgers
A new law in Iraq could hinder rather than help journalists

Peace of mind: Chan Kin-man, Jemimah Steinfeld
From umbrellas, to prison, to freedom. A word from a founder of the Hong Kong Occupy movement

“She will not end up well”: Clemence Manyukwe
In Rwanda, opposition politicians have a nasty habit of being assassinated

Modi’s plans to stifle the internet: Shoaib Daniyal
India’s prime minister is keeping a tight grip on what goes online

Editor in exile: Ian Wylie
A Burmese journalist shares his story of arrest and escape

Evading scrutiny: Beth Cheng
China’s new tactic for dealing with critics: keep the trials under wraps

Lowering the bar: Ruth Green
Working in law in Afghanistan is now impossible – if you’re a woman

A promise is a promise: Amy Booth
Argentina’s president is taking a chainsaw to media freedom

Going offline: Steve Komarnyckyj
Beyoncé is blacklisted in Russia and the question remains: who runs the world?

The beacon of hope: Nilosree Biswas
The next chapter is unwritten for a library in Delhi

A story of forgotten fiction: Thiện Việt
In Vietnam, book censorship is a fact of life

Special Report: Unsung heroes - how musicians are raising their voices against oppression

The sound of silence: Sarah Dawood
Musicians in Afghanistan fear for their livelihoods, lives and culture

The war on drill: Mackenzie Argent
Artistic freedom is not a privilege extended to all musicians

A force for good: Salil Tripathi
Exploring the soundtrack of resistance in Bangladesh

Georgia on my mind: JP O’Malley
In the face of repression, the beat goes on in the Caucasus

Murdered for music: Kaya Genç
The meeting of politics and song can be deadly in Turkey

A Black woman who dared to rock: Malu Halasa
How one artist smashed into a genre ringfenced for white men

Fear the butterfly: Katie Dancey-Downs
Iranian singer Golazin Ardestani will never take no for an answer

In tune with change: Tiléwa Kazeem
In Nigeria, Afrobeats is about more than a good song

Singing for a revolution: Danson Kahyana
Nothing enrages the Ugandan government like hearing Bobi Wine

Cuba can’t stop the music: Coco Fusco
Government and musicians alike understand the political power of song

Comment

Dangerous double standards: Youmna El Sayed
Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s offices is a warning sign for press freedom

Musician, heal thyself: Mike Smith
The death of Liam Payne brings the issue of mental health into sharp focus

Democracy, but not as we know it: Martin Bright
Is the USA stuck in the hinterland between democratic and autocratic?

Silence has to be permitted in a world with free speech: Jemimah Steinfeld
Index’s CEO argues that the right to stay quiet is as precious as the right to protest

Big Tech shouldn’t punish women for seeking abortions: Raina Lipsitz
Trump is incoming. So too is a growing threat to online abortion discussions

Culture

Cell dreams: Russia’s prisoner art: Mark Stimpson
Dissident artwork created under Putin’s nose, and shared with Index

No Catcher In The Rye: Stephen Komarnyckyj, Hryhorii Kosynka
The words of a writer killed by the Soviet regime live on in a new translation

A life in exile: Mackenzie Argent, Jana Paliashchuk
What it means to be homesick, through the eyes of a Belarusian poet

An unfathomable tragedy: Sarah Dawood, Dimi Reider
One year on from 7 October, a moving piece reflects on the human devastation

You are now free: Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Katie Dancey-Downs
An exclusive translation from a Sudanese writer in exile, who has faced ban after ban

Putin will not stop until he’s stopped: Evgenia Kara-Murza
The Russian dissident who fought for her husband’s release (and won) has the last word

Journalists have a “right to life”

18 Oct 2024 | Malta, News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine

Hello, readers. This is Sarah Dawood here, editor of Index on Censorship. Every week, we bring the most pertinent global free speech stories to your inbox.

I must confess that today’s newsletter is very bleak, so I won’t be offended if you click away in search of a more optimistic end to your week. We’re reflecting on how journalists are increasingly being silenced globally, not only with the threat of legal retribution or imprisonment, but with death - often with little or no repercussions for those responsible.

This week marked the seven-year anniversary of the murder of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb attack on 16 October 2017. She reported extensively on corruption in Malta, as well as on international scandals such as the Panama Papers (the historic data leak exposing how the rich exploit secret offshore tax regimes).

Two hitmen were convicted for her murder in 2022, but criminal proceedings are still ongoing against three more suspects, including the alleged mastermind of the assassination and the alleged bomb suppliers. This week, free speech organisations signed an open letter to Malta’s prime minister calling on him to promptly implement robust, internationally-sound legal reform to keep journalists safe in future. The letter pointed to a public inquiry into her death, which found it was both “predictable and preventable”, and highlighted “the failure of the authorities to take measures to protect her”.

The start of this month marked another grim milestone - six years since the death of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. He was a regular contributor to major news outlets like Middle East Eye and The Washington Post, as well as editor-in-chief at the former Bahrain-based Al-Arab News Channel. A vocal critic of his government, he was assassinated at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Such attacks on free speech continue. We were appalled, for instance, to learn of the death of the 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna last week, a reporter from the front-line of the Russia-Ukraine war who had written for Index about her experiences. The circumstances around her death are still unknown, but we know she died in Russian detention.

Increasingly, governments or powerful individuals act with impunity – whereby their human rights violations are exempt from punishment – willfully ignoring international law that states journalists are civilians and have a “right to life”. For many victims, the course of justice is either delayed, as in Caruana Galizia’s case, or the circumstances around their deaths are obfuscated and murky, as in Roshchyna’s. Question marks remain over who is ultimately responsible, or how it happened, creating a cycle of censorship whereby it’s not only the journalists and their reporting that are silenced, but their deaths.

This impunity has been shown in plain sight throughout the Israel-Hamas war. To date, 123 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, with the Committee to Protect Journalists concluding that at least five were intentionally targeted. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deny these claims, yet an Al Jazeera documentary recently revealed that journalists live in fear of their lives, and their families’. One of the most high-profile cases of a targeted attack was that of Hamza al-Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief and veteran journalist Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife and another two children were also previously killed in Israeli airstrikes. Two Israeli and three Lebanese journalists have also been killed in the conflict, with the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrant applications for both Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes.

All these cases show a growing disregard for journalists’ lives, but also for the very essence of journalism itself. When not threatened with death or physical violence, media personnel are threatened with imprisonment, the closing of legitimate news offices, internet blackouts, and psychological and financial abuse. SLAPPs - strategic lawsuits against public participation - for instance, are being increasingly used globally by powerful and wealthy people as an abusive legal tool to threaten journalists into silence with eye-watering fines. How can “the fourth estate” truly hold power to account, when those in power can so easily dismantle and destroy their means of doing so?

At a time of devastating global conflict, the ability for journalists to report on stories free from the threat of harm, imprisonment, lawsuits or death has never been more important. To protect journalism itself, international and national law must work harder to protect the individuals most at risk. Without the threat of retribution for powerful individuals, the cycle of censorship will only continue.

 

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