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.
29 Nov 2024 | News and features, Venezuela
As thoughts turn to the festive season, Americans will have the chance to ponder what the New Year and a Donald Trump presidency will mean. But this is not the only significant election in the continent to have happened this year.
This weekend Venezuelans will take to the streets to demonstrate against President Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in elections on 28 July. The opposition candidate, 75-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia, has pledged to return to the country from exile in Spain to take office on 10 January 2025, ten days before the Trump inauguration. His victory has been recognised by the international community, including the White House.
International human rights groups have raised concerns about the increasing authoritarianism of the Maduro government with widespread surveillance of its citizens and arbitrary detention of political opponents. According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country as of May 2024, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire population.
González, who has never stood for office before, took the place of the original opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado, when she was banned from standing by the government and forced into hiding. Machado now faces charges from the Venezuelan federal prosecutor, which accuses her of supporting American sanctions against her country.
Machado has joined fellow opposition figure Magalli Meda in calling for protestors around the world to paint their hands red as a symbol of the suffering of the Venezuelan people as they take to the streets around the world. The UN reported that at least 23 protesters were killed at anti-government demonstrations in the weeks after the election and approximately 2,400 were arrested.
Despite the desperate situation for Venezuela as it sinks further into economic crisis and international isolation, this year’s elections have provided a model of democratic activism. Voters were shocked when the government announced that Maduro had gained a convenient 51 per cent of the vote but failed to provide numbers. This in a country whose election system was described by the Carter Center, set up by the former US President Jimmy Carter, as “the best in the world”.
In this context, readers of this newsletter would be advised to listen to the latest episode of the This American Life podcast, which includes a report on Venezuela by Nancy Updike. A transcript is also available.
Updike tells the story of the movement, led by citizens, to document the country’s entire voting record, precisely in case that Maduro’s ruling party tried to fix the vote. The movement was called Seiscientos Kah, which means 600k, and was so named because of the number of volunteers needed to make the checks. The organiser is now in hiding.
Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a tally of votes for each candidate on election day. Each candidate is allowed a witness at every one of the 30,000 machines stationed around the country. 600k was set up as a giant relay race with the witnesses at the start and activists collecting the results and taking them to monitoring centres at secret locations. Here, using a laptop, a scanner, and a portable generator, the results were then uploaded to a website and the original copies taken to a separate secret location.
This extraordinary process meant that when polling closed, opposition supporters across the country uploaded videos of people reading out the results, which had come directly from the voting machines.
The situation in Venezuela remains grim. Updike quotes from a UN report on the protests against Maduro after the election. Those charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred included: “opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathised with the opposition or criticised the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community”.
A statement from a member of the UN fact-finding mission said that many of those detained: “were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men”.
Maduro has called the actions of the 600k movement a “coup”. In fact, it may provide a blueprint for the fight against election-rigging by authoritarian governments around the world.
18 Jul 2024 | Americas, News and features, Venezuela
Venezuelans will cast their vote for the country’s next leader next Sunday, choosing between a president who is dominating the public space but has not answered a reporter’s question since last year, and an opposition candidate who is all but barred from TV and radio and is relying on social media to spread his message.
The election on 28 July sees authoritarian president Nicolas Maduro squaring off against opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who is leading in the polls despite receiving almost no exposure on traditional media.
Instead, Gonzalez and his main backer, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, have relied on Instagram and TikTok videos, as well as WhatsApp viral messages, to galvanise the democratic opposition ahead of the vote.
This week, Caracas is plastered with election banners showing a smiling Maduro projecting confidence for Venezuela’s future, but journalists hoping to travel to Venezuela to interview him are set for a letdown, as the authoritarian leader has not conceded an interview since December and several international media have seen their visa requests denied in recent days.
The country’s Ministry of Communication closed applications to cover the election on 19 April. Everyone entering the country to report without proper accreditation, or outside the dates granted by the ministry, is at risk of being deported.
Maduro’s weekly agenda is top secret for security reasons, which means most reporters who are already in Venezuela are not informed when the candidate is holding a rally and are kept away from the campaign.
Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders called on Venezuelan authorities to allow local and international journalists to cover the election, especially since the government withdrew an invitation for EU electoral observers in June.
Yet, in the first week of the campaign Maduro has racked up over 1,400 minutes of airtime on Venezuela’s public television station, while none of the other candidates were covered for more than 15 minutes, the Spanish news agency EFE reported.
None of this is new for Venezuela, a country where almost 300 radio stations were shut down by the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL) in the last two decades on charges of operating clandestinely, according to the local NGO Espacio Público — it has been reported today that their site has been geoblocked.
Radio stations are particularly censored, critics claim, because in a country with chronic electricity and internet problems, they often represent the only information channel available to the most vulnerable sectors of the country, where government support is stronger.
“When Gonzalez announced his candidature a couple months ago, all international media started interviewing him, but did we? We can’t do that,” a radio journalist in Caracas told Index this week, asking for their identity to remain anonymous for fears of being fired if they denounced censorship in the workplace.
Government censors from CONATEL constantly monitor the airwaves searching for dissident content and send warnings to the radio station’s management if any programme is deemed too leaning against the government, the reporter told Index.
The current tension in the newsroom is reminiscent of another recent episode of political tension, when opposition leader Juan Guaidó mounted a constitutional challenge against Maduro by swearing himself in as interim president.
“Our programme was taken off the air back then when two guests, political analysts, both referred to the government as ‘the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro,’” the reporter told Index.
“I remember it was a Friday, I left the office and went home. The following Sunday I was doing calls to plan the week ahead when our executive producer told me the programme was being cancelled. Management decided to take the show off the air because CONATEL had called in, complaining that nobody corrected the guests. I spent the following four months doing nothing before a new programme came around,” they said.
From that moment, all radio studios in this reporter’s organisation have installed an instruction document next to the main console, advising the programme’s director to correct any guest suggesting Maduro’s government is not legitimate.
In recent years, radio stations have diversified their coverage by allowing reporters to write more freely when posting online, where the government’s censors have a harder time controlling who’s behind problematic content.
This double standard, however, only makes the self-censorship on radio programmes even more evident.
“Online we made a profile of each candidate running in the election, we also did other opposition leaders… But on air? That’s not going to happen,” the reporter said.
Luz Mely Reyes, who co-founded online media Efecto Cocuyo in 2015 after decades working in print, told Index that none of this is new, saying: “Censorship in Venezuela is systemic, it runs deeper than the yoke on radio and TV stations.”
Despite escaping the jurisdiction of CONATEL’s censors, Venezuelans need a VPN to access Efecto Cocuyo’s URL, which is geoblocked by the government. Venezuelan companies are also wary of purchasing adverts on the website, fearful they might incur trouble with the government.
“Sometimes, security becomes a factor too. You end up asking yourself: is it worth it to send one of my reporters to cover this, or that? It’s not like they give you an order, they want to force you to self-censor your coverage,” Reyes told Index.
Still, both traditional and new media are finding new strategies to keep the lights on for free information in Venezuela.
“Silence in radio speaks volumes, sometimes, I just leave blanks in the radio report,” the anonymous radio reporter told Index. “I can’t say that this is an authoritarian regime, but I can give the latest malnutrition figures an organisation has shared, and in the end the audience can make up their mind.”
After a moment of pause, they sighed: “Being a journalist in Venezuela is frustrating: there are no opportunities, the pay is shit, and journalism itself is at risk… but what fuels me is the hope that, one day, things change.”
7 Apr 2014 | News and features, Venezuela, Young Writers / Artists Programme
(Image: Sergio Alvarez/Demotix)
Like other countries, Venezuela’s young are eager to explore the world. Every opportunity to learn becomes important in the formation of the young mind. In Venezuela, a crippled education system prevents normal development. While the well-born go to private schools and have access to every benefit, the mass of Venezuela’s students confront an educational system that tells them: “You can’t but you tried.”
The most embarrassing and painful thing about the deplorable state of the country’s schools is the level of the government’s indifference. Though the government of Nicolás Maduro offers programmes like “Simoncito”, “Mision Ribas” and “Mision Robinson” these is basic education that doesn’t adequately prepare students to pursue higher studies. The programmes seem to condemn the disadvantaged among Venezuela’s population to a remedial existence. If some of these children make it to higher education, the odds are stacked against them and their families.
In the end, it all comes down to money. Venezuela needs to spend more to let students be students. But with foreign reserves short, all but national priorities are left off the funding list. Every area of science instruction needs improvement. Budgets are not even close to covering the costs of labs, let alone providing learning aids or even actual textbooks. A prize-winning robotics team at Caracas’ Universidad Simon Bolivar works with outdated electronics that are often patched together. When the team wanted to take part in an international competition, they were denied assistance — meaning just a few of the team could do it because that was all they could afford to pay out of their own pockets. Another group, which took part in the Latin American conference of the model UN, found themselves staying in primitive conditions in Mexico because they were denied dollars, the currency they needed to pay bills. Despite the discomfort, the group won six awards.
Even with the obvious deficiencies in education, Venezuela has a large population of well-prepared professionals across a wide spectrum of expertise. But based on political affiliations, these people cannot work for the development of the nation. No wonder Venezuelans have begun to leave the country in search of a better future for themselves and their families. This exodus is manifesting itself worst of all among teachers. The ramshackle education system can ill afford this brain drain. But, again, it’s understandable when even those with advanced degrees from internationally respected institutions earn less than approximately £40 per month. When the government’s own basic food basket is priced at nearly £200 per month, it’s impossible to support a family without second or third jobs. Under strict rules, teachers are not allowed to apply for the loans that could support home or car ownership. In effect, teachers are sentenced to live with relatives for life. Yet they continue to teach out of love for the craft with the hope they they can raise a new generation of Venezuelans who can think for themselves and question dogma. Without them, the youth of Venezuela would be lost.
In recent interviews, the educational minister Hector Rodriguez said: “We are not going to take you out of poverty for you to go and become opposites.” His statement meant that Venezuela’s students should understand that their wings are already clipped and any dream of progress or improvement is invalid.
The government’s approach to education aims to make Venezuelans think it has the absolute truth and will decide what’s right for students. The lower classes won’t have any choice but to believe what they are told.
After 15 years Venezuelans have become accustomed to waiting for the government to wave a magic wand to provide what they need. The sense of personal responsibility now seems lost. Effort doesn’t deliver results, so Venezuelans don’t try. It’s an indirect way for the government to choose a person’s destiny.
At the same time, scarcity – and not just in an educational sense – is the new normal. Everyday basics like toilet paper, coffee or cooking oil are the subjects of long hunts that lead to the back of an equally long queue. Hospitals cancel operations for lack of supplies and cancer patients miss treatment for lack of medicine. And even though the government’s late March devaluation of the bolivar will fill the shelves in the shops, the average Venezuelan will be unable to afford the supplies.
For the government, scarcity is just a glitch — just like the blackouts when “iguanas eat the cables” – and not because the energy minister is not doing his job.
It’s impossible to walk down streets without being paranoid — one eye on the road and the other keeping watch of everything around you. On average 48 people are murdered in the country every day. Venezuelans can be beaten and robbed with no recourse to justice because the police and the criminals are often in partnership.
The Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to bring improvements, but the lack of daily essentials and a robust education system leads one to the conclusion: The basement has a bottom.
This article was posted on April 7, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
