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.
27 Feb 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Hong Kong, News and features
Jimmy Lai has led many lives. An impoverished factory worker, a garment billionaire, owner of one of Hong Kong’s most influential papers, a born-again Catholic. He’s a man of mythical status; someone who doesn’t know their official birthday, who left Mao’s China spurred on by the taste of chocolate, who once lived in a house with a pet bear, monkey and flying fox. A son, a brother, a husband, a father, a boss, a friend. He is all of the above. But to many today he’s known mostly as a political prisoner, and not just any prisoner – arguably the prisoner the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fears the most.
“The more I was forced to think about Jimmy in a larger historical context, the more convinced I am that there is nobody in the 75 years of CCP rule like Jimmy,” said Mark Clifford, the author of The Troublemaker, a new biography on Lai.
“He’s got three things that make them afraid of him,” Clifford continued. “They are: money, which means he can buy the best lawyers; a megaphone in the form of media; and principles. That may be the hardest of them all to deal with – because they don’t [have principles] right?”
Lai has been in custody since December 2020. In the years leading up to his arrest, he became a constant thorn in China’s side. In stark contrast to other tycoons who rose to the top in Hong Kong, he was one of the fiercest critics of the CCP and a leading figure campaigning for democracy in the former British territory, championing freedoms through his publications, his writings and his on-the-ground activism. This earned him the status of hero to many in Hong Kong, but the CCP branded him a “traitor” who threatened Chinese national security.
I’m chatting with Clifford a week after the launch of his book in London, and a few weeks after it was released in the USA, which is where he has flown in from. A journalist by training, Clifford lived in Hong Kong for decades from the late 1980s, and now leads the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, which campaigns for political prisoners specifically and for the improvement of rights in Hong Kong more generally.
Clifford is the obvious biographer of Lai, having known him since the early 1990s and having also served on the board of Next Digital, Lai’s media company. And it’s clear from Clifford’s book that he’s a big fan of Lai’s. That’s not to say the book is a hagiography. Clifford does recall Lai’s mistakes. He explained that he wanted to show Lai how he was and is, “warts and all”, and this makes the book a valuable addition – it’s a portrait of the man himself, rather than the symbol he has become.
Still, there is no denying, as Clifford told me, that it’s a “portrait of a genuinely heroic person”.
“The Chinese have been battling with him for 30 years. Every other business person has cracked, right? Everybody surrenders,” said Clifford, circling back to Lai’s defining qualities of strength and principle.
Of Clifford’s many memories (which include when Lai cooked for Clifford – an unusually down-to-earth gesture for a man of such wealth – and many trips on Lai’s boat), one of the most vivid is a dinner at Clifford’s own house straight after an infamous column of Lai’s from 1994. In it, he described then Chinese premier Li Peng as a gui dan – turtle egg. Beijing did not take the slight lightly – they closed down Lai’s Beijing store. At dinner, Lai spent the entire evening talking about it, how corrupt the CCP were and how they had to go.
“He was quite defiant. He just felt so passionately,” said Clifford.
It’s easy to point to several moments in Lai’s life and declare them the turning point. The protest movement and crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 is one, when Lai’s garment factory supplied t-shirts to the protesters. Clifford sees his column in 1994 as another. Lai’s response was to write a follow-up piece in which he apologised for the bad language used in the first while highlighting that he still meant every word.
In The Troublemaker Clifford paints a picture of Lai as an outsider – an immigrant who wasn’t born into money and didn’t always easily fit in with the company he kept – and this was perhaps part of his success.
“It [his background] excluded him, but it also gave him a power, because it meant he could play by his own rules.”
He was always a natural entrepreneur, knowing what and how to sell and as he became more political his ambition became more focused:
“He had a product – democracy – which he wanted people to buy,” said Clifford, talking of Lai’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, which blended high-brow and low-brow content to help the message travel further.
As defiant as Lai might be, he is not unflappable. Clifford remembers a time he saw him break down in tears. Lai was giving a speech ahead of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and it was then, to Clifford’s own knowledge, that Lai first spoke publicly about his concerns that he could be arrested.
“On the one hand, you’re thinking ‘come on, this can’t really happen’, because it seems so unreal. On the other hand, Jimmy Lai probably has a better sense of what could happen. So he was right. He did get an extra 20-something years of freedom, but, you know, he was right,” Clifford said on reflection.
In 2020 Hong Kong authorities passed the National Security Law. Many of those who had been heavily involved in the protest movement left Hong Kong. Lai did not. He was arrested twice that year and has not seen a day of freedom since.
His national security trial started at the end of 2023. He is now 77 and has diabetes. And yet despite the years in prison – the bulk of which he has spent in solitary confinement – and his poor health, when Clifford has watched him during his court appearances, he remains defiant.
“It seems like he’s giving as good as he’s getting. It’s really remarkable,” he noted.
Lai’s Catholic faith is part of the reason. He believes that no suffering is meaningless and has found refuge in faith. From his cell, he writes letters and sketches illustrations, often drawing on religious symbolism. A few years ago, a series of these were published in our magazine.
Clifford’s book is about Lai, which means it’s ultimately about Hong Kong, a city that Clifford tells me he loved as soon as he saw it. Arriving there in the late 1980s, Clifford was drawn to it as “a place of incredible freedom”. Even though today that freedom has gone, Clifford has not foregone all hope. He holds onto the belief that economic growth ultimately leads to more freedom. “Bread is not enough,” he said in no uncertain terms.
He used the conjunction “when” Lai gets out of prison rather than “if”, and told me how I’ll meet Lai one day and he’ll thank me and everyone who has helped get him out. As for this book, it’s one of Clifford’s many contributions to that effort. Of course the CCP will hate it but, like the book’s protagonist, Clifford has little time for what the CCP thinks.
“If the price of Jimmy getting out is that they pulp the book, that would be fine,” he said.
The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic was published in hardback in the USA in December 2024
27 Feb 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
“Dear Alexei, it’s been a year that darkness has fallen upon us – and yet, your ideas and your determination give us strength,” read a letter placed on opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s grave on 16 February 2025, marking the one-year anniversary of his death.
That day, more than 5,300 people attended the Borisovskoye Cemetery in Moscow where he is buried, according to the Beliy Schetchik (White Counter) movement. Despite temperatures reportedly dropping to a frosty -8 degrees Celsius, Navalny supporters waited in line outside the cemetery to pay their respects.
Artist and musician Yaroslav Smolev was one of the attendees. He told Index: “By joining in, not only did we get a chance to feel that we’re among like-minded people, but we also showed the [rest of the] Russian society what matters to us.”
In the days following Navalny’s death last year, Smolev spoke to Index for the first time. He had been arrested for staging a solo protest in support of the opposition leader in the centre of St Petersburg. Around that time, hundreds of mourners were being detained across the country, namely for laying flowers at improvised memorials.
Even so, people have returned to these locations this year to honour Navalny’s memory – and were predictably punished. According to the rights group OVD-Info, on the anniversary of Navalny’s death, at least 26 people were detained. In the city of Volgograd, for example, Alexander Yefimov from the Yabloko opposition party was jailed for 14 days for bringing flowers and a photo of Navalny to a memorial and placing them at a monument dedicated to victims of Soviet-era repression.
Carrying portraits of Putin’s main opponent – and even signs with his name on – became illegal after Navalny and his movement were declared “extremist” in 2021 and 2022.
For Smolev, Navalny is a role model who enabled him to overcome his fears. “He spoke with police officers in a natural and straightforward manner,” Smolev said. “There was not even a hint of fear in his behavior.” Smolev stressed that if it weren’t for Navalny, he would have never joined many peaceful protests, starting in 2017.
He added that if Navalny hadn’t gone as far as sacrificing his life “for his values and his ideals”, “the general public might not have realised that his lifelong battle was, in fact, heartfelt”. He was alluding to Navalny’s return to Russia in 2021 from Germany after recovering from a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
For Nadezhda Skochilenko – the mother of former Russian political prisoner and Index award winner Aleksandra Skochilenko – Navalny’s death caused “much pain”. Above all, she told Index, she thinks of him as “the son of his mother”, Lyudmila Navalnaya.
When Navalny died, Aleksandra was in jail. She had been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages. She was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange last summer.
Asked if the news of Navalny’s death increased her fear for the safety of political prisoners like her daughter, Nadezhda responded: “I’m too well-informed about what’s going on [in Russian] prisons. I’m frightened for everyone [who’s incarcerated] from the moment they’re arrested.”
She said that people die in jails, in pre-trial detention, and even during arrest. In 2024, eight political prisoners perished; one of them was pianist Pavel Kushnir, who spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Over the past year, the pressure on political prisoners has increased, Nadezhda said. They are placed in solitary confinement “more frequently and for longer periods of time”. In these tiny punishment cells, people are not allowed to lie down during the day, among other restrictions.
To make matters worse, in many cases, proper medical treatment is not provided to political prisoners – a fact that “the authorities no longer try to conceal”, Nadezhda said. She is also concerned that minors accused of “terrorism” in politically-motivated cases are placed in pre-trial detention, instead of on house arrest.
She added that “on a regular basis” dissidents are denied access to letters sent by their supporters. Nevertheless, people keep writing to them – “the most useful and safest act [of resistance] within reach of everyone”, according to Smolev.
Despite the pressure of the authorities, supporters and families of jailed dissidents battle with prison administrations over human rights abuses. They also attend court hearings when they can – while some are still open to the public, many political trials are now closed, especially the ones of dissidents charged with treason, Nadezhda explained.
But acts of resistance “cannot be entirely suppressed”, she said – “hence “[Putin’s] regime responds with even more severe crackdown on dissent”.
25 Feb 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Australia, News and features
Petrina Harley likens direct action to giving birth.
“My body knew it had a job to do, so I got on and focused on my inner strength,” the 53-year-old mother of two told Index via phone from Perth. “I find it really empowering.”
Harley is a climate activist of eight years facing trial in June for repeatedly blocking entry to Australia’s biggest gas hub to be built in a decade, a AU$16.5 billion ($10.35 billion) project in the Pilbara on the Burrup Peninsula of Western Australia (WA) by sector giant Woodside.
It may come as a surprise to some, but not to Harley, that new research from the University of Bristol released in December showed that Australia is now the world’s top country for arresting climate and environmental protesters.
“I’ve been arrested four times now,” said Harley. Alarmingly, arrest is now a common response in 20% of all climate and environmental protests in Australia, with the international average being 6.3%.
This is also part of a broader crackdown in the country, where new measures in the state of Victoria purportedly aimed at tackling recent cases of anti-Semitism could be used to target climate protesters, human rights lawyers have now warned.
There’s particular concern that a potential ban on “lock on” devices such as glue, chains or locks, could be used to take aim at environmental campaigners. Similar laws have been announced in New South Wales (NSW).
“The arrests [in Australia] are one dimension of criminalisation,” said Oscar Berglund, senior lecturer in International Public and Social Policy in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol.
“There have also been multiple new anti-protest laws passed. What we are seeing currently is an intensifying criminalisation of protest in both democratic countries and less democratic countries.”
Harley, who began protesting after she had children, said that she had tried “everything under the sun” including running for the Senate in the lower house with the Socialist Alliance party, holding weekly stalls in town and gathering petitions, before she took part in two blockades in WA.
In the first one, in November 2021, Harley and another Scarborough Gas Action Alliance activist, Elizabeth Burrow, used a caravan to obstruct entry to the Woodside project. The activists bonded their arms into a concrete drum inside the vehicle. Harley was “locked on” for 16 hours. When she refused to move, she was arrested in the caravan and after being taken to hospital for injuries locked up overnight and charged. Harley said it was “complete overreach” by police.
The pair pleaded not guilty and used an emergency defence – normally reserved for cases like murder – arguing that the activities of Woodside are directly putting lives at risk. In 2023 they were found guilty by a magistrate’s court in Karratha in the Pilbara region of failing to obey an order given by an officer, obstructing public officers, and unreasonably obstructing or preventing the free passage on a path or carriageway.
They received a six-month community-based order, with a requirement to complete 100 hours of community service and were also handed a $600 fine each. Police initially sought more than $33,000 in compensation from the activists for removing them from the caravan, but this application was later dismissed.
Last July, Harley and another activist, Emma, a high school student, used a car and a boat to block the only access road to the same project, in a bid to stop its operations. Harley was “locked on” for 12 hours. She is now facing three obstruction charges over this.
At her trial in Perth in June, she will again plead not guilty using the extraordinary emergency defence.
“I’m very excited, I’ve got a really ethical lawyer who’s keen to test the case because it would be a precedent,” Harley said. “People have tried it before, but no one’s actually won. I’ve got some very high-profile witnesses to testify.”
David Mejia-Canales is a Sydney-based senior human rights lawyer at Australian group Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC). He said that an analysis of two decades’ worth of anti-protest legislation in Australia from 2003 onwards found that out of 49 pieces of legislation introduced, most target environmental protesters in the streets, at mines or logging sites. But laws are broad and vague despite peaceful protest being protected under international law.
“In Australia you just have to look out the window to notice that the climate crisis is getting worse and the thing that our governments are appearing to do is to jail climate protesters instead of actually doing anything that is meaningful and quick and long lasting about this,” said Mejia-Canales.
He said HRLC wasn’t aware of any activists in Australia who have been acquitted on an emergency defence. But framing the necessity defence (breaking the law to prevent greater harm) as an “extraordinary emergency defence” could allow protesters to use the growing acceptance of climate change as an emergency that requires urgent attention, he said.
However, just last week a climate activist in Melbourne was told that he cannot rely on evidence from climate experts following charges relating to an Extinction Rebellion protest.
Mejia-Canales said that Australia urgently needs a Human Rights Act, which could be crucial for climate activists, reinforcing arguments that their actions seek to uphold fundamental rights rather than merely disrupt public order.
A WA government spokesperson told Index: “Everyone is entitled to protest peacefully in WA, however police will respond to violent or threatening behaviour.”
Index approached the minister for climate change and energy for comment, but did not receive a reply.
Woodside said that it supported respectful debate. But it said acts intended to threaten, harm, intimidate or disrupt employees, their families or any other member of the community going about their daily lives “should be met with the full force of the law”.
Read more: UK journalists fall victim to new police tactics
