1 Dec 2022 | North Korea, Tyrant of the Year 2022
“As far as freedoms go, there is no landscape so bleak as North Korea,” says Index assistant editor Katie Dancey-Downs. “Under Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian regime, citizens are fed propaganda in lieu of actual food. And as for elections? The ballot paper has only one option.”
Kim Jong-un continues to rule as the supreme leader of North Korea, keeping alive the brutal legacy of the Kim dynasty. He makes a grand show of nuclear weapons on the global stage (including recently firing more than 20 missiles across the sea border with South Korea) while much of the country lives in extreme poverty and under close surveillance. One of Kim’s most recent photo opportunities was alongside what is believed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile – he watched as the test was launched.
Criticism of the regime is not tolerated. Dissent is punished severely. Executions and prison camps drive fear under this totalitarian regime, while lavish displays of affection are demanded by its leader.
“North Koreans are nothing short of modern-day slaves who have been deprived of freedom of expression and movement,” says Jihyun Park, a UK-based activist who escaped from North Korea – twice. “North Korea is a place where I lived like a machine and remained silent.”
North Korea lands in last place in the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index, out of 180 countries. Only official government news sources are permitted, which are packed with propaganda. No outside information gets in, and what the rest of the world gets to see is controlled with the tightest of grips. Some tyrants might overreach on internet clampdowns, but for Kim it’s all or nothing. North Koreans only have access to a localised intranet, with absolutely no view of the world wide web in any form.
With Kim Jong-un the third generation in the dynasty, and talks of his eventual successor hotting up, Dancey-Downs comments: “Perhaps beyond simply Tyrant of the Year, Kim should be up for a lifetime achievement award.”
1 Dec 2022 | Nicaragua, Tyrant of the Year 2022
There is nothing more disappointing (or predictable) than a revolutionary hero turned tyrant. In the great tradition of Lenin and Castro, Ortega promised a new dawn as the leader of the rebel Sandinista National Liberation Front which opposed the Somoza family dictatorship in the late 1970s.
Ortega first took power in 1979 after the overthrow of the regime and served until 1990, first as the head of the Junta of National Reconstruction and then as President. After an absence of 17 years, he was re-elected in 2007 and has remained in office ever since. His rule has become increasingly brutal with crackdowns on his former political allies and opponents to his autocratic methods.
Protests against his regime began in 2014 over plans to grant a concession to a Chinese businessman to build the Nicaragua Canal. Protests were led by local campesinos whose faced the expropriation of their land. Further protests by indigenous people who blamed the government for forest fires flared in 2018 and compounded by opposition to tax increases and benefit reductions.
According to Human Rights Watch, Ortega has dismantled nearly all institutional checks on his presidential power. Opposition parties were banned in advance of the 2021 presidential elections and opponents imprisoned. Civil society has been neutered and an estimated 2,000 NGOs closed down with organisations receiving funding from international sources labelled as foreign agents. Over 100 journalists have been forced into exile in Costa Rica along with an estimated 80,000 asylum seekers.
In elections held in November 2022, the Sandinista Liberation Front announced it had won control of all 153 municipalities in the country. The result was inevitable after the banning of all opposition parties.
“For his critics, the Nicaraguan president has recreated a family dictatorship on the lines of the hated Somozas. His vice-president Rosario Murillo would disagree. She described the recent elections as ‘an exemplary, marvellous formidable day in which we confirm our calling for people.’ But then she is Ortega’s wife,” says Index’s editor-at-large Martin Bright.
1 Dec 2022 | Mexico, Tyrant of the Year 2022
“He who has nothing to hide, has nothing to fear”. These were the words uttered by the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a February 2022 press conference held the day after Heber López Vásquez, founder and director of the digital news outlets NoticiasWeb and RCP Noticias, was shot and killed. However this was not a call for greater transparency and action to respond to the ever-climbing rate of journalist murders in Mexico. He was publishing what he alleged were the confidential financial details of leading journalist, Carlos Loret de Mola, in response to the journalist’s reporting.
“This act of intimidation and the abuse of the presidential office would be egregious in any circumstance. However In Mexico, against a backdrop of rampant impunity and one of the worst track records for the safety of journalists, it is far worse than that,” says Index’s policy and campaigns officer Nik Williams. “According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 151 journalists and press workers have been killed in Mexico since 1992. The causes of these murders are complex; but a messy tangle of narco-politics, organised crime, corrupt police and state officials and runaway impunity has made Mexico one of the most dangerous locations to be a journalist outside a warzone. In fact, so far in 2022, Mexico is second only to Ukraine for the number of journalists killed.
Since Obrador only came to power in 2018, it would be overly-simplistic to lay this solely at his feet. However, according to Article 19, attacks on the press have increased by 85% since he took power, with every single Mexican state witnessing such incidents for the first time in 2021.
When there is a culture of impunity and the devaluing of journalists, the scene is set for violence. It is this erosion of the civic fabric that makes Article 19’s director for Mexico and Central America: “His [Obrador’s] speech causes other political actors to replicate his attacks. These actors feel empowered and allowed to attack in the face of a narrative that presents the press as an adversary. We are in a war speech, where the enemy must be annihilated.”
After publicly leaking Carlos Loret de Mola’s alleged salary and potentially violating Article 16 of the Mexican Constitution in the process, Obrador labelled journalists who are critical of him as “thugs, mercenaries, sellouts” and “the real mafia.” This framing establishes a false and dangerous parallel between the free press and criminal enterprises, further emboldening threats that can soon escalate to violence.
Impunity, the like of which is found in Mexico, requires significant and proactive action to address. It is not something that will just right itself when no one is looking. It requires a commitment to the value of free expression. It requires action. According to Human Rights Watch, “[o]f the 105 investigations into killings of journalists conducted by the federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression (Feadle), since its creation in 2010, just six have led to homicide convictions.” What good is a dedicated prosecutor if the rate of convictions is so low? Not only is this a failure to the family, friends and colleagues of the murdered journalists whose killings are being investigated by Feadle, this is a signal to those seeking to silence critical reporting: you can continue uninterrupted and undisturbed. This weakening of the mechanisms by which journalists can be protected is also seen in the 2020 decision of the Mexican Congress and supported by Obrador, to eliminate the independent funding that supported the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists. Now the mechanism is dependent on the Interior Ministry to pay for protection measures, but funds have been consistently cut. Leading media freedom organisations and 14 members of US Congress have raised concerns about this, seemingly to no avail.
Williams says: “What Obrador sees as a war against the elites, we see as a war against journalists, and ultimately free expression. Without Obrador stepping forward and addressing the ingrained climate of fear and impunity, instead of fixating on those who report on uncomfortable facts, Mexican journalists will remain stuck in the crosshairs of those seeking their silence.”
1 Dec 2022 | Belarus, Tyrant of the Year 2022
“You can usually tell the quality of a tyrant’s credentials by the number of people he has thrown in jail on spurious grounds and Europe’s last dictator, Alyanksandr Lukashenka, is no exception,” says Index associate editor Mark Frary.
Lukashenka started his fifth term as president in August 2020, following an election that most credible observers believe was neither fair nor free.
According to the human rights organisation Viasna, the list of political prisoners has now grown to 1,442 people. “This includes our former Index colleague Andrei Aliaksandrau and his wife Irina Zlobina, who were sentenced to 14 years and nine years respectively in early October for ‘establishing an extremist formation’,” says Frary.
It seems that even the slightest hint of opposition to Lukashenka can see you head off to the country’s infamous prisons. In November, 69-year-old teacher Ema Stsepulyonak was given a two-year sentence for supposedly insulting the Belarusian leader following a police shoot-out at a Minsk apartment that left two people dead.
Lukashenka is clearly worried by such “extremists”. His government has started a growing list of people who are considered as such and anyone appearing on it are not allowed to hold public office, teach, publish writing or participate in military service. On one day at the end of October, Lukashenka’s regime added a frankly ridiculous 625 extremists to the list. “Belarus must be so dangerous with this many extremists, right?” asks Inna Kavalionak of Politzek.me in the winter 2022 edition of Index on Censorship magazine.
“Lukashenka’s fate is closely tied with that of his friend and neighbour Vladimir Putin,” says Frary. “In the illegal war in Ukraine, Lukashenka has allowed Belarus to be used as a launchpad for Russia’s soldiers into the country’s northern flank. He has also promised that ‘Europe will tremble’ if Belarus is attacked.”
By aligning himself with Putin, Lukashenka is firmly planting himself on the wrong side of history.
