28 Mar 2025 | Americas, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, India, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, Russia, Turkey, United States
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 will publish a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression from the past seven days. This week, we look at the detention of an Oscar Award-winning documentary maker and a poorly-monitored Signal group chat.
Attacks on investigative journalism: The assault and detention of Hamdan Ballal
On Monday 24 March, Yuval Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist and co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, announced on X that his fellow co-director Hamdan Ballal had been assaulted by Israeli settlers, and was subsequently taken from an ambulance by Israeli soldiers and detained. Ballal is a Palestinian filmmaker from Susya in the occupied West Bank. He was released on Tuesday 25 March. In an interview with The Guardian, Ballal said that the attack was “revenge” for the creation of No Other Land, which explores Israeli soldiers’ destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets. The documentary was created by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists and filmmakers, with particular focus on the positive alliance developed between Abraham and a Palestinian activist called Basel Adra. This collaborative effort has proved controversial in Israel and the occupied West Bank, and Ballal recounted being physically attacked and beaten by both settlers and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. His lawyer, Lea Tsemel, said Ballal didn’t receive adequate medical care for his injuries in detention, and that she had no access to him for several hours after his arrest. Ballal’s treatment represents a significant attack on investigative journalism, and follows a string of free expression violations in Israel and the occupied West Bank, including restrictions on journalists and the censorship of cultural products depicting Palestinian-Israeli relations.
National security breaches: US war plans leaked via Signal group chat
This week saw a most remarkable story come out of the USA; on 11 March, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the magazine The Atlantic, was accidentally (and rather carelessly) added to a top secret group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal where senior US Cabinet members were discussing plans for attacks on Houthi targets across Yemen. Chat members included US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, among other chief members of the Donald Trump administration. At first sceptical of the “Houthi PC small group” chat’s legitimacy, Goldberg realised it was definitely real after attacks discussed in the chat were carried out a few hours later. To hold such crucial discussions via a messaging app, then to mistakenly add a journalist to said discussions, constitutes a monumental breach in American national security. Both Hegseth and US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz have faced great scrutiny for this major mishap. Meanwhile, Goldberg has faced backlash from the highest echelons of the US government, with Trump himself attempting to lead a smear campaign against the journalist.
Film censorship: Globally-acclaimed film Santosh banned in India
With Hamdan Ballal bearing the brunt of the backlash to his co-directed documentary in the West Bank, there are other reports of film censorship coming out of India. Santosh, a film created by British-Indian director Sandhya Suri, has received international plaudits for its depiction of corruption and bigotry eminent in the Indian police force. Yet it was this very portrayal that has seen it banned from being screened in India. The film – which features an all-Indian cast and is filmed completely in the Hindi language – debuted at Cannes film festival and was nominated for both a Bafta and an Oscar. But its depictions of misogyny, caste-based violence and prejudice, institutional Islamophobia and brutality in the police force mean it may never see the light of day in the country of its setting.
Protest crackdowns: BBC correspondent deported from Turkey
Following the arrest and detention of Istanbul mayor and presidential political rival Ekrem Imamoglu, protests erupted across major cities in Turkey. Clashes between demonstrators and riot police reportedly saw more than a thousand people detained between 19 and 23 March. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has cracked down on the protests – and seemingly, their coverage as well. BBC correspondent Mark Lowen, who had been in the country reporting on the demonstrations for several days, was taken from his hotel by Turkish authorities on 26 March, according to the BBC, then deported back to the UK on 27 March. The authorities claimed that Lowen was “being a threat to public order”. Imamoglu is seen as Erdoğan’s main rival for the 2028 presidential election, and similarly to how many see his arrest as an attempt to remove political opposition, the deportation of a journalist could be seen as an attempt to obscure the truth.
Political prisoners: Russian anti-war activist’s prison sentence extended
Maria Ponomarenko is a Siberian activist and journalist who was jailed in 2023 for reporting on the Russian bombing of a theatre in Mariupol, southern Ukraine. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the attack, thought to have killed hundreds of civilians, despite multiple eyewitness reports. Ponomarenko was sentenced to six years in prison after her journalism was deemed to be “fake news”. Now, her sentence has been extended by one year and ten months because she allegedly attacked two prison guards, a charge that Amnesty International has described as “spurious” and which the human rights group claims is an attempt to further silence and repress her. Ponomarenko has reportedly launched a hunger strike while in prison to demand better treatment and justice for her false charges.
28 Mar 2025 | Belarus, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Russia
On Sunday 30 March, I and mothers like me across the UK, will be waking up to a chorus of “Happy Mother’s Day!”, handmade cards and flowers thrust in our faces as we curse whoever made the decision to put the clocks forward on today of all days.
As anyone who is a mother knows, it’s a hard job. The balancing of family life, careers and – dare I say it – our own social lives; the emotional and mental load that falls to us; attempting to raise tiny people into well-rounded grown-up humans.
Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise all this, in ourselves and in our own mothers. But this Mother’s Day, I’d like to think about those who are mothering in extreme situations. Those who are fighting for the release of their children, who are held in prison in autocratic regimes after raising their voices. Those who are campaigning for the release of partners, after they stood up to autocrats. And those who are behind bars themselves after speaking out, and have been ripped away from their families.
One of those mothers is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for president against Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2020 in Belarus. She is now in exile in Lithuania, where she leads the opposition coalition.
Tsikhanouskaya never wanted to be a politician. She describes herself as having been an “ordinary woman”, where her family was her world. The change of course was thrust upon her when her husband Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was a willing opposition leader, was arrested in May 2020 then sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021.
With her husband incommunicado, Tsikhanouskaya has led the campaign for his release, taken up his political reins and continued to raise their two children.
On Belarus Freedom Day (25 March), just a few days before Mother’s Day, Lukashenka chose the national awareness day to be sworn in after his sham election. Meanwhile, Index on Censorship organised a protest outside the Belarusian embassy in London, writing the names of political prisoners in chalk on the pavement. Meanwhile, Tsikhanouskaya continued to raise the issue of Belarusian freedom on the international stage. From her office in Lithuania, she took time out to talk to me about what happens when the worlds of motherhood and campaigning collide.
“Raising children is a heavy duty, even if you’re an ordinary person,” she told me. And for her, there is an additional toll.
“You always live with the feeling of guilt, because you are not spending enough time with the children,” she said. A relatable feeling. “Very unexpectedly for them, I became […] the person who is defending their daddy, who is defending the country, the leader that had to travel a lot just to raise the alarm about the situation in Belarus.”
She tries to pack in time with her children when she can, but is conscious of not overwhelming them.
“All these years, we are also living with the pain,” she said. Her daughter was only four when her father was imprisoned, and Tsikhanouskaya does everything she can to make sure she remembers his voice and what he looks like. Her daughter writes letters, but they go unanswered.
“It’s very painful for her, and she’s asking, ‘Mum, maybe he is not alive anymore, and you are lying to us, or maybe he doesn’t love us anymore’,” she said.
Tsikhanouskaya is forced to have conversations with her children that no mother would ever want to conduct, about brutality and torture in prisons. Meanwhile her son, who is older, tries not to ask painful questions. He doesn’t want to write letters to his father, because he doesn’t want to flaunt his own freedom.
“I hope, I really believe that they’re learning a lot from these difficult lives. They’re learning how people can sacrifice their lives, their freedoms, a comfortable life, just for something bigger and more important,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Beyond this, she said she feels the Belarusian people are learning something – that women can lead movements. This, she said, is not the message that was left to them from their Soviet Union past. Meanwhile, she is nourished by the Belarusian people, and by international communities.
This Mother’s Day, Tsikhanouskaya has a message for other mothers fighting similar battles: “Don’t even dare blame yourself that you are a bad mother because you have to be a good leader of your campaign. Your example is the best lesson your children can learn.”
She spares a thought too for the mothers who are political prisoners themselves, and describes how this tactic of separating mothers from their children is “like they cut a piece of your life”.
One of those women is Antanina Kanavalava, a member of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign, who was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for preparing to take part in a mass riot, related to her role in running a Telegram channel. Her husband was also detained for the same reason, leaving behind their son and daughter, who are both under the age of eight and were taken abroad by their grandmother.
“Dictators know that children are the most effective leverage,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
In fact, Tsikhanouskaya herself had her children used against her. She was told to leave the country, and was threatened with prison if she refused.
She said that she was told: “Your husband’s already in prison. Your children will be in an orphanage.”
The winner of the Trustees Award at our Freedom of Expression Awards in 2024 also knows what it means to campaign for your husband’s release while continuing to raise children. Russian human rights activist Evgenia Kara-Murza, the advocacy director of the Free Russia Foundation, continued to raise her three children while she took up the campaign to fight for her husband’s release.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested and jailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2022, after he’d already been poisoned twice. His wife spent the next two years travelling the world and speaking out against her husband’s imprisonment and Putin’s regime. In August 2024, he was finally freed as part of a prisoner exchange.
In Turkey, the Saturday Mothers have held sit-in vigils in Istanbul since 1995, for loved ones who have been forcibly disappeared or murdered. They have spent more than 1,000 Saturdays conducting peaceful demonstrations. After their 700th vigil in August 2018, they faced a crackdown, their peaceful protest broken up with tear gas, water cannons and arrests. Finally in March 2025, 45 members of the Saturday Mothers who had been arrested were acquitted.
Elsewhere in Turkey in 2024, mothers of Crimean political prisoners held a series of exhibitions called I Will Always Wait For You, My Child, demonstrating how their lives had been devastated by the Russian occupation of Crimea. Photos and captions were displayed on easels and online, each with the photo of a mother whose child was ripped away from her, detained and taken to Russia.
The exhibition was supported by Ukrainian NGO Human Rights Centre ZMINA, the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey, and the Crimean Tatar diaspora.
“My children are my air. I will fight for them until my last breath,” wrote Dilyara Abdullaeva, a 70-year-old mother whose sons Uzeir and Teymur were sentenced to 12.5 and 16.5 years in a strict regime colony.
On the UK’s shores, Laila Soueif has been putting her life at risk for her son, British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
El-Fattah has been in and out of prison in Egypt for the last decade, after becoming a vocal pro-democracy campaigner. When his most recent sentence of five years came to an end last September, he was not released. His mother went on a hunger strike for the next five months, and was eventually told by doctors that her life was at risk.
When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer finally made a call to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in February this year, she switched to a partial hunger strike, to give the negotiation process time to take its course.
Soueif spoke to me over a video call this week, and she described herself as “functioning”.
“I realised that both the Egyptian and the British government are not going [to act], except when there is a crisis. So, I decided to create the crisis,” she said.
While in the past she has felt enthusiastic about campaigning, albeit sometimes exhausted and bored by the situation, since September she has felt very angry.
Soueif’s hunger strike lasted an incredibly long time before she deteriorated, but she doesn’t think that what she has done is particularly extraordinary.
“I really believe that most mothers would be willing to take that kind of risk for their kids,” she said. She is probably right. Regardless, it’s a position no mother wishes to be in.
A hunger strike was not Soueif’s first port of call. She had taken legal routes, staged demonstrations and spoken to the British government.
“In the end, none of it worked,” she said.
She is now worried she made the wrong choice coming off her hunger strike, as the momentum seems to have been lost. She is considering taking it up again, and can only hope there are motions of clemency from the Egyptian government around the end of Ramadan in a few days’ time. If she does go back on a hunger strike, she will be putting herself at huge risk.
Her message to other mothers fighting for their loved ones is this: “If you start a fight, don’t give up. Because however hard the fight is, to give up without achieving your objective will probably be much, much harder.”
In this fight, she has never been alone. She spoke about the incredible solidarity she has had, and the difference it has made.
From exile in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya acknowledged that mothers like herself need some time, care and a listening ear too. While she fights for freedom in Belarus, she also continues to be an ordinary woman.
“Save yourself first, and then go and ruin dictatorships,” she said.
Mothers, even when they’re not fighting autocrats, have incredible strength and resilience. Perhaps, as some of these women show, it is the mothers who will get dissidents out of prison, and take down oppressive regimes.
17 Mar 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
Index on Censorship has much in common with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. We were all established during the Cold War, us in 1972 and RFE and RL in 1950 and 1953 respectively. We were all designed to offer uncensored news and alternative viewpoints to countries behind the Iron Curtain. And we all went beyond the Cold War remit both geographically and chronologically. Index never just covered the USSR, while the Radio Free brand later expanded into newsrooms operating across the globe; none of us closed shop in 1991.
Our shared central mission – to cover oppression whenever it manifested and to centre the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced – has not always been easy or free from controversy. But the attacks never felt existential. Until Donald Trump’s administration.
Building on threats already made to close RFE/RL and Voice of America, which we reported about here, on 14 March the White House issued an Executive Order aimed at “[r]educing the Scope of the Federal Bureaucracy”. Among the agencies impacted was USAGM, which funds RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia and VOA. On 15 March, RFE/RL was notified by the USAGM that its federal grant agreement, which funds its global operations, has been terminated. RFA was similarly notified by USAGM special adviser Kari Lake that its grant had been terminated and that the organisation must “promptly refund any unobligated funds”. The director of VOA, Michael Abramowitz, confirmed that “virtually the entire staff of Voice of America—more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff—has been placed on administrative leave” as well.
These attacks feel as personal to us as they are political.
The White House published a news article focused on VOA, highlighting the importance of the funding cuts to “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
The idea that they are “radical propaganda” is rubbish, more double speak from an administration that will argue left means right. The Radio Free outlets and VOA, all of whom are editorially independent from the US government, run huge newsrooms staffed by people trained to the highest standards. They have played a vital role in the global media environment, with their journalists taking great risks to operate in countries that have severely curtailed media freedom, such as Belarus, Myanmar, China, North Korea and Russia.
Abramowitz said VOA provides “objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny”, while RFA President and CEO Bay Fang has described the move as “a reward to dictators and despots” and one that “benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense”. Renew Europe, a group of European MEPs, warned that these cuts could “leave a void that could be exploited by authoritarian regimes seeking to suppress free speech and control narratives.” We can only agree. Several autocrats have already welcomed the move.
The decision comes as the USAID funding freeze has already endangered public-interest journalism, particularly in Ukraine, where it has supported coverage of Russia’s unlawful invasion and the actions of the Ukrainian government. As Kyiv Independent’s editor Olga Rudenko highlighted, the sudden funding cuts have forced some Ukrainian outlets to slash their budgets by 90%. This crisis extends beyond Ukraine, threatening the entire global media landscape.
So here is our message to all of those who have been impacted: we stand firmly in solidarity with you. In today’s world, where lies are cheap, the brand of journalism that RFE/RL and others champion is not a luxury – it is an essential tool to safeguard democratic accountability. There is a reason these brands outlived the Cold War. It’s now up to all of us to help see them through the Trump years.
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”.
