A complete music ban has meant both professionals and amateurs must stop playing or risk their lives. We explore the impact on those in exile and those who remain
Since Iranian singer-songwriter Gola fled her home country in 2011, she has continued her fight for women’s rights in exile
With Trump now in office, state and local governments in the USA must push tech companies to protect women’s private data
Yoweri Museveni’s most formidable challenger refuses to be silenced and remains on the frontline of protest
The police are disproportionately censoring and criminalising music by young Black men, with drill at the forefront
Pursuing a legal career has become impossible for women in the country. Some of those women told Index their stories
Index travels to Germany to meet exiled newspaper editor Kyaw Min Swe, who faced torture and imprisonment at the hands of the military junta
While the future looks brighter, the mental health of artists has long been neglected
The country’s rich literary history has been plagued by censorship and book bans
Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.