Index on Censorship partnered a lively event at Rich Mix, London on Tuesday 21 April, along with Counterpoints Arts and Platforma Arts & Refugees Network.
Event recap: Whose story is it anyway?
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Gunter Grass: The past has left its mark on what we thought was virgin territory
Günter Grass, a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on April 13 at the age of 87.
How exiles are using social media but fear spies listening in
Social media is being used innovatively to share news and stories by those that have fled from danger, says Jason DaPonte
Wired up: why refugees in exile remain silenced
People who have fled dangerous regimes now use free apps and digital connections to stay in touch with their former home, but they often worry that those networks can also be used against them, says Rachael Jolley
Spring 2015: Across the wires – how refugee stories get told
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text="How can more refugees get their voices heard? The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine is out now and features a special focus on the threats to free expression within refugee...
Is privacy more vital than national security?
Martha Lane Fox and retired Major General Tim Cross debate how far governments go when balancing individual rights and safeguarding the nation. This is an extract from a longer feature in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine
Across the wires
Where people are living in fear a connected world can be frightening, it can carry gossip and information back to those who pursue them. Decades ago, when people escaped from their homes to make a new life across the world, they were not afraid that their words, criticising the government they had fled from, could instantly be broadcast in the land they had left behind.
Words and Deeds: Incitement, hate speech and the right to free expression
The importance of free expression is as great as ever, as is the need to debate openly difficult issues – ones which may cause pain, offence, anger. Nobody ever said free expression was easy.
#MagnaCarta800: Debating the merits of a First Amendment for the UK
On the day when the four surviving copies of the original 1215 Magna Carta were briefly brought together for the first time, Index on Censorship held a debate to celebrate the launch of the winter issue of the magazine.
Drafting freedom to last
When England’s barons forced their King to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, it was an attempt to wrest absolute power from the monarch by his wealthiest subjects, those who already held position and fortune. It was by no means an equality drive, intended to spread rights to the common folk, but every journey begins with a single step, and every action has unintended consequences.
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.