7 Apr 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, France, News and features, Newsletters, Turkey, United States
The headline today is clear: lawyers need lawyers. It’s frustrating to focus on the USA given the constant coverage the country already receives, but it would be negligent to overlook this issue. President Donald Trump’s attempts to target law firms that oppose his administration’s agenda are deeply troubling. Lawyers should not have to fear government retribution simply because they represent clients or work with colleagues tied to the political opposition. This is a blatant threat to the rule of law, one designed to stifle free speech.
Politico offers a thorough breakdown of the situation, concluding that, for now at least, the practical consequences might seem relatively minor. The firms being targeted are so expensive that most people can’t afford their services. This isn’t necessarily a comforting thought. The flipside could be argued – that only the most financially robust law firms can afford to take on an expensive battle with Trump’s administration. Many smaller firms may quietly decline controversial cases, prioritising ease over principle, and thus further narrowing access to justice.
Over in France, a different kind of danger faces lawyers following Marine Le Pen’s conviction this week. It sparked a dangerous wave of threats against the judges involved, which were so severe that President Emmanuel Macron has been forced to publicly reaffirm the independence of the judiciary, and one of the trial judges has been placed under police protection.
It is, unfortunately, a sign of the times that bears repeating: lawyers represent clients, but they do not necessarily share their views. Yet here we are, facing the reality of a world where legal professionals are increasingly seen as extensions of their clients’ beliefs, rather than independent advocates of the law – a line trotted out for years in Iran, Russia and China and now finding a home elsewhere.
“As if the coup against democracy wasn’t enough, they cannot tolerate the victims of this coup defending themselves. They want to add a legal coup to the coup against democracy,” said Istanbul’s recently jailed Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on the arrest of his lawyer. Mehmet Pehlivan has since been released. But as Pehlivan’s own lawyer poignantly remarked, his arrest was a “warning”. For Turkey’s autocratic leader, the message is clear: beware the clients you choose. For the rest of us, the takeaway is equally urgent: if we don’t stand firm in support of the defenders of justice, the very concept of justice itself could be dismantled.
6 Mar 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
As the Oscars season came to a close this weekend, all eyes were once again on Hollywood. The prestigious awards ceremony, which took place on Sunday in Los Angeles, played host to some of the biggest names in cinema, all of whom were hoping to secure one of the infamous golden statuettes afforded to the year’s biggest on-screen successes.
This year, many awards were given to Index-worthy films and documentaries, as they bravely called out human rights and free speech abuses.
No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration investigating how Palestinian activists are protecting their communities from destruction by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, won best documentary. Another short feature from Iran, In the Shadow of the Cypress, won best animated short film, with the directors using their acceptance speech to speak out for their “fellow Iranians who are suffering”.
Meanwhile, Adrien Brody won best actor for playing the lead role in The Brutalist, a postwar film documenting the life of the fictional László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and esteemed architect. The Brazilian film I’m Still Here also won best international film, and is based on the true story of the lawyer and activist Eunice Paiva, whose husband was “disappeared” and murdered in the 1970s.
Clearly, there was much to celebrate from this year’s awards. However, beneath the glitz and glamour lies the much murkier issue of the close relationship between Hollywood and the US government.
When imagining a film produced in collaboration with the US Department of Defence (DoD), most would presumably envision a recruitment video for the armed forces, or another form of military propaganda. In reality, it’s likely that many people have already seen a film that has been vetted and approved by the DoD without even realising.
Have you watched Top Gun, Apollo 13 or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? What about Transformers, Armageddon or I Am Legend? If so, you’ve seen a film from the US military-entertainment complex. From James Bond classics like Goldfinger to modern Marvel creations like Iron Man, the DoD have had a hand in countless Hollywood productions over the years.
This is no conspiracy theory. In fact, the DoD’s own website boasts of its “long-standing relationship” with Hollywood filmmakers, in which they state that their two-fold goal is “to accurately depict military stories and make sure sensitive information isn’t disclosed”.
Despite this transparency, the fact that a department of the federal government influences the stories that are told by the oldest and biggest film industry in the world raises valid questions concerning censorship and free speech in cinema.
Roger Stahl, a professor, writer and film director who has spearheaded research on the US military-entertainment complex for the last 20 years, spoke to Index last year, around the time that Index on Censorship featured a special print edition on censorship in cinema.
He said that, although it is less direct, the DoD has historically engaged in censorship by vetting Hollywood productions.
“When filmmakers come to the DoD, they routinely express how great they think the film is going to be for military PR [public relations]. That is, they are trying hard to sell the script to the DoD right off the bat,” he said. “Then later there are the actual DoD requests for script changes, which almost never encounter resistance.”
“None of this process really qualifies as censorship in the traditional sense of a government entity enforcing its will under the threat of legal consequences,” he added. “The outcome is much the same, though.”
Stahl has explained in previous research how the process of Hollywood filmmakers collaborating with the Pentagon works: if a production company approaches the DoD to ask for their help with or endorsement for a movie, the Entertainment Liaison Office will request to see the script. If the script is at odds with military interests, it will be denied. However, if they decide the script is compatible enough to work with, they sometimes request changes to be made.
The logical outcome of this is that a lot of Hollywood films tend to show the military in a good light as filmmakers look to garner favour with them. The assistance of the armed forces in a film can be crucial in terms of obtaining much-needed personnel and equipment and the Pentagon would be less willing to offer help to those seeking to portray them negatively.
This is described by Debra Ramsay, a lecturer in Film Studies at Exeter University, as being “a question of negotiated influence rather than outright censorship or control”.
The DoD has stated: “While Hollywood is paid to tell a compelling story that will make money, the DoD is looking to tell an accurate story.” This is a rather generous sentiment which suggests that the changes they request are to do with correcting the use of military language and equipment to ensure it is accurately portrayed. However, Ramsay calls the focus on the term accuracy a “minefield”.
“Accuracy is also often about which narratives institutions like the DoD choose to invest in and which they don’t,” she told Index last year. “The DoD of course are concerned with questions of accuracy, and of course they have a vested interest in showing the armed forces favourably.”
Stahl contends that this interference from the US military – who will of course have their own agenda – in filmmaking amounts to military propaganda “with qualifications”.
“Propaganda is a term with a lot of baggage – it has associations with government-produced material with an overt political message designed to influence civilian populations. Products that arise from the Pentagon-Hollywood collaboration do not fit perfectly into this definition,” he explained.
“In my view, though, I have no problem calling this one of the biggest peacetime propaganda operations in our nation’s history,” he added.
However, Ramsay points out that the producers are not forced to change the script and that it is “up to the filmmakers” to decide how far they will allow the relationship with the DoD to go. She gives the example of the film producer Darryl Zanuck, who was cooperating with the US military when producing his 1962 film The Longest Day, and refused the request to cut a scene where two members of the US army shoot two German soldiers who have surrendered.
“The military could not control whether or not that scene made the final cut,” she said.
This demonstrates the grey areas that surround this issue, as the Pentagon is not actually stopping anti-military films from being made, but is rather indirectly incentivising pro-military films. However, this undoubtedly can lead to self-censorship, which is still a genuine issue – particularly when concerning the world’s biggest film industry.
Stahl has attempted to raise awareness of the extent of the relationship between the DoD and Hollywood, as he and his small team of researchers have utilised Freedom of Information requests to find that the Pentagon and the CIA have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows. Stahl says that although the fact that the Pentagon works with Hollywood and has an Entertainment Media Office is public knowledge, we don’t know the extent of this collaboration, which is a concern.
“The Entertainment Office does [media] interviews, they’ll admit to working with films, and even to making the military look good,” he told Index. “But they have been extremely guarded about the details.
“You could read a dozen press accounts, and no one could tell you how many productions were subject to official script oversight.”
It is difficult to measure the extent to which the military-entertainment complex influences how the US armed forces are actually perceived. Stahl points to audience effect studies being “few and far between”, while Ramsay suggests that it is a “difficult thing to quantify”.
“As an academic, I’d be wary of suggesting that these films influence people or change their perception – I’d want to see evidence of that – but they certainly appear to nudge people in a particular direction,” said Ramsay. “There is no clear-cut answer here, but I think the relationship definitely needs scrutiny and publicity.”
However, any amount of censorship is too much. The objectives and agenda of the DoD cannot be placed above a filmmaker’s right to freedom of expression. At last weekend’s Oscars ceremony, filmmakers were rewarded for the stories they have shown us on the screen, many of which gave a space to vital yet unheard voices; we mustn’t forget those stories that aren’t allowed to be told.
To read more like this, check out the cinema-themed issue of our quarterly magazine from July 2024. For further issues, you can subscribe to the magazine here.
5 Feb 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
In around 2009, Golazin Ardestani was preparing to go on stage in Tehran. The venue was sold out. She and her university classmates had been through months of rehearsals for their traditional concert and had followed all the rules: they had their songs cleared by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the lead singer was male, the musicians would be seated on the floor and everyone was dressed appropriately, including the correct hijab protocols. And yet, as Ardestani – who goes by the stage name Gola – walked towards the stage, she was told: “No, you can’t perform with them. No female musician can go on stage tonight.”
She stood at the side of the stage and watched her friends perform without her, clutching the formal permission papers which should have allowed her to sing, and which had been wilfully ignored. This is just one of the heartbreaking memories she has of being a female musician in Iran.
A few years later, Ardestani left Iran for good. Now in her 30s, she is based between Europe and the USA, where she creates music that speaks out against the regime. In 2018, she founded her own record label, Zan Recordings, so that she could finally release music on her own terms.
Ardestani was born in Isfahan, in Iran. She taught herself to yodel as a child and grew up in a house filled with a mix of the traditional Persian music favoured by her parents, and the Iranian and Western pop smuggled in by her older siblings, whose musical preferences were inspired by their desire for freedom.
“My teenage years were full of those stolen moments listening to forbidden songs on satellite,” she told Index over email. “Music, and especially female performers, gave me a sense of freedom that was completely absent on our heavily censored government TV.”
Growing up, Gola had never seen a woman on an Iranian stage. At age 19, fed up with trying to conform to traditional norms and still being prevented from singing, she joined some friends and a group of three sisters to create Iran’s first girl band, Orchid.
They wanted to challenge the narrative of female singers being “provocative”, and to resist patriarchal and authoritarian forces. Behind their music was a deep understanding of the history of Iranian music from before the Islamic revolution of 1979, when female singers like Googoosh and Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri had been celebrated and were free to perform to mixed audiences.
Orchid was only allowed to perform for female audiences, who had to remain seated. Gestures or movements that could be interpreted as dancing were strictly forbidden. The performers themselves had to avoid showing emotion on stage.
“There were female morality police at the end of each row, watching us and the audience,” Ardestani recalled.
The memory of those performances, in front of thousands of women, is still vivid.
“It was such a powerful experience that I remember making a promise to myself that night: that I would sing, I would sing solo, and I would one day sing for a mixed audience,” she said. “I held onto this vision of a day when our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons could feel proud of the women on stage.”
Whilst in Iran, Ardestani was arrested three times by the morality police, experiences which she said shaped her music and her determination to keep fighting.
The first occasion was when she was just 16, when she was arrested because her hijab wasn’t covering the front of her hair. She sat terrified in a cell and sang to distract herself. A woman shouted at her: “Shut up, close your mouth, shut your ugly voice!”
The last time she was arrested was particularly brutal and was due to the clothes she was wearing. “As they were about to push me into the van, I put on my fighting face, but chaos quickly ensued,” she said. A crowd began to form, and she hit something hard, breaking her arm. With the situation out of control, the police’s superior told her to go home in a taxi.
“All of this because of my ripped jeans, even though I was wearing a long manto [overcoat] and a scarf covering my hair.”
Ardestani considers herself lucky to have escaped alive. Under similar circumstances, Mahsa “Jina” Amini died in custody in September 2022, the moment that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
Iranian singer Golazin Ardestani demonstrating in Washington DC. Photo by Nathan Napolitano
Before leaving Iran in 2011 both to perform without persecution, and to study for a master’s in music psychology in London, Ardestani made a final attempt to plead her case and gain permission to record an album.
“I had to trick my way through the system just to get my foot in the door of the Department of Direction, where the man who granted permissions for male singers worked. But when I finally met him, he wouldn’t even look at me, staring at the floor as he spoke,” she said. She was told that Iran didn’t need a Céline Dion.
Ardestani knew then there was no coming back. “Once I started singing freely, I would lose my home forever,” she said. On the day she left, after Norouz (Persian New Year) in 2011, she decided she would dedicate everything to fighting for change.
“I promised myself that my music would carry the voices of those who can’t be heard,” she said. “There was no way for me to be fully myself as a musician, as a singer or even as a woman. They controlled every aspect of my voice, my body, my agency.”
She knows that she cannot return, and is confident that if she did, she would be arrested and charged with Mofsed fel-Arz, or “spreading corruption on earth”, due to her open challenges to what she calls Iran’s “fabricated religious theocracy”. This charge could carry a death sentence.
The songs she has finally had the freedom to create include Haghame, meaning “It’s My Right”, which is about the freedom to choose whether or not to wear the hijab. Another, Khodavande Shoma, translates to “Your God”, and includes the lyrics: “Your god is sick, it seems – a sick, dangerous criminal. Your religious beliefs, death, and destruction. Your prayers are for murder and blood.”
For female musicians in Iran, freedom is still out of reach. Many women rely on underground scenes, Ardestani told Index, but this comes with its own risks. Posting performances on social media can also lead to arrests, intimidation and the charge of Mofsed fel-Arz.
And censorship does not always respect borders. At a concert in Canada in 2023, designed to support the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Ardestani was told she could not sing Khodavande Shoma, because the organisers believed it was “attacking people’s religion”. This, she said, is not what the song is about. Rather she is “confronting the twisted version of religion that the Islamic regime has created”.
“I am an Iranian woman fighting for freedom and, specifically, for women’s freedom of choice and speech. Yet here I was, outside of Iran, being told by an organiser – of a concert for freedom, no less – that I couldn’t sing a song in a free country,” she said.
She told the male Iranian organisers that she would sing that song, or not sing at all. They relented.
For every performance Ardestani gives, another song in Iran is silenced. She often posts on social media about the plight of imprisoned Iranian musicians. She condemned the arrest of Zara Esmaeili, who often sang covers of international pop hits in public with her hair uncovered. One social media video showed Esmaeili performing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. She was arrested on 25 July 2024, and it is believed that she has not been heard from since.
Ardestani is a huge admirer of Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who won an Index Freedom of Expression Award in 2023. He was first arrested in 2022, and after being detained multiple times and tortured, he was charged with “corruption on earth”, jailed and given the death sentence. The death sentence was dropped after campaigning from prominent musicians and human rights organisations including Index, and Salehi was released in early December.
“It’s unimaginable that a musician, simply expressing himself through lyrics, could be sentenced to death for his art,” Ardestani said. “Iranian music is powerful and resilient; it’s the heartbeat of a people who have been silenced in many other ways. Each song is a form of resistance, a declaration of our existence and our hope.”
As to why Salehi and other musicians are targeted, she has a strong theory: “They know the power of a good song, the potential of meaningful lyrics and the way music can unite people to inspire change.”
For Ardestani now, everything is about fighting for freedom for all – not just in Iran, but globally. She describes music as a way to transform personal struggles into a collective moment. In another of her songs, Betars Az Man, or Fear Me, she sings:
“The butterfly is fleeing its cocoon.
Fear me, as I am that butterfly.
Fear me, as freedom is my voice.”
In her upcoming song Zaloo, she says she will offer her vision for ending theocracy in Iran – a musical call to action. For Ardestani, music is a form of rebellion. And as she told Index, far from being afraid herself: “Those who wish to silence me should be the ones who are afraid.”
See also: Science in Iran: A catalyst for corruption
28 Jan 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
After three years of Taliban rule, nobody really believed women could be erased further from public life in Afghanistan.
“But the Taliban found another way: they’ve restricted our voices and faces,” said Maryam, an Afghan legal scholar and journalist.
Maryam, who uses a pseudonym, was referring to the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws, which were passed in August and ban women from speaking, singing or showing their faces in public. If women break the rules, they – or their male relatives – face imprisonment.
Maryam spoke to Index in hushed tones over Signal from the relative safety of her living room in Afghanistan.
The new laws typify the rapid intensification of the Taliban’s crackdown, which has already seen women banned from parks, workplaces, schools and universities since it took power in August 2021. Once implemented monthly, harsh laws, decrees, house raids and arrests are now a daily occurrence.
“It’s a very intense attack on the dignity of humans and the dignity of women,” said Shaharzad Akbar, executive director of Afghan rights group Rawadari. “Before, there was some wiggle room, but it’s very scary because now it’s law, it’s out there and people are required to comply with it.”
The crackdown isn’t manifesting just through new laws.
“The Taliban have also been destroying institutions and putting new institutions in place to actually implement and carry out their vision of society,” said Akbar. She should know, having chaired the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission before it was abruptly dismantled when the Taliban toppled Kabul.
At that time, Maryam was on the cusp of completing her legal training, having graduated from university, and working as an assistant lawyer in the country’s courts, often assisting on highly sensitive divorce and domestic violence cases that drew the ire of Taliban members.
After the takeover, the Taliban closed the country’s only bar association. All existing licences to practise law were revoked, putting lawyers out of work. Many like Maryam, who were still waiting for their licences to be formally approved, never received their documentation. As the Taliban filled the Ministry of Justice and the courts with its own lawyers, judges and prosecutors, Maryam’s chances of a legal career vanished.
Maryam was just a toddler when the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Now 26 years old, she finds it hard speaking about the early “bad days” after the Taliban’s recent return to power and the subsequent unravelling of decades of progress on women’s rights.
She has relatives – mostly judges and their immediate families – who have managed to leave the country. Yet, like many Afghans, she’s not been deemed enough “at risk” to warrant evacuation. Instead, she’s focused on doing what she can while living under the constant threat of Taliban restrictions.
Through word of mouth, she established a homeschool teaching English to girls in her neighbourhood. It was one of the many underground schools that proliferated across Afghanistan after September 2021 when the Taliban issued a ban on girls over the age of 11 attending secondary school.
However, as rumours swirled about the rising number of secret schools, the authorities began doing door-to-door searches. She received messages over Telegram from Taliban fighters warning that she’d be thrown into jail if she didn’t stop “working against the regime”.
Maryam said she had no choice but to close the school.
“We already were in danger because of the position of my family in the justice system,” she said. “I didn’t want to make more danger for myself, my family or my students.”
In December 2022, the Taliban banned all Afghan women from attending university. Maryam’s husband, an engineer, was teaching at a local university, and he was devastated that his female students were being forced to give up their studies.
Under the most recent law, he faces losing his job if he leaves work to accompany Maryam anywhere. Without him, she’s forbidden from leaving the house.
The Taliban has created hundreds of positions for men to teach in gender-segregated religious schools – madrassas – across the country, while women with university degrees and teaching experience are forced to stay at home.
Rawadari – one of the few organisations that has maintained a network on the ground documenting violations of civil and political rights since the takeover – has been closely following the detrimental impact of the education ban on women’s and girls’ mental health across Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The overwhelming sense of ‘hopelessness’ is undeniable, said Akbar, who now lives in the UK in exile but still finds reports of what’s happening back home extremely difficult to hear.
“I think most of the girls believed this will be temporary and never imagined they would experience what their mothers had experienced,” she said. “They are depressed and they’re struggling to keep their hopes alive.”
Maryam continues to battle her own mental health struggles as a result of the restrictions, but has found some solace in working in the shadows as an online educator, mental health trainer, journalist and advocate.
However, as the internet and social media platforms are increasingly monitored by the Taliban and its spies, she has had to be more careful about her online interactions.
“I can’t trust who is safe and who is not,” she said. “There are women on Instagram and other places who are looking for women who are disobeying Taliban rule. For that reason, I don’t share anything about myself. They just hear my voice and the teachings I’m offering them. I’m scared and my colleagues are scared, but we go forward, do the job and provide teaching for those who need it.”
Unsilenced in exile
There is also growing momentum from Afghan women internationally to give their sisters inside the country a voice. One such woman is Qazi Marzia Babakarkhail, who became a judge in Afghanistan at 26 – the same age that Maryam is now.
Babakarkhail worked in the family courts, later setting up a small shelter for divorced women in Afghanistan and a school for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Those initiatives were a lifeline to dozens of women, but they soon drew unwanted attention from the Taliban and she fled the country in 2008 after two assassination attempts.
Since moving to the UK, Babakarkhail has learnt English and now works as a caseworker for an MP near Manchester. As well as helping campaign for the evacuation of hundreds of female judges, she speaks daily to former colleagues and friends still trapped in Afghanistan.
Her advocacy earned her an invitation to an all-Afghan women’s summit held in Tirana, Albania, in September. It was the first time since the Taliban regained power that such a large group of Afghan women – more than 100 from across Europe, the USA, Canada and Afghanistan itself – had been given an international platform to discuss the rollback of women’s rights. They are so often excluded from conversations on Afghanistan’s future.
This marked a sharp contrast with a UN meeting held earlier in June in Doha, which was heavily criticised for inviting Taliban leaders and neglecting to bring Afghan women’s voices to the table.
Babakarkhail said the summit had opened ‘a new window of hope’ for Afghan women. Seeing women who defied the Taliban travel to Tirana reminded her of her own perilous journey and gave her hope for Afghanistan’s future.
“They are real activists because they are still fighting and still stay in Afghanistan,” she said. “Of course they do a lot of things silently, but they will go back. They know how to deal with the Taliban and they will keep silent. They made us proud.”
She is hopeful the summit – which discussed the unravelling human rights situation, the urgent need for humanitarian aid and international recognition of the Taliban’s mistreatment of women as “gender apartheid” – will provide the necessary wake-up call to the international community.
“We don’t want the United Nations or other countries to recognise the Taliban as a government,” she said. “This group is a stand against the Taliban and a stand for people in Afghanistan.”
Pushing for accountability
The international push for accountability, both at the International Criminal Court – which has an ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan – and the groundbreaking move to bring a gender persecution case against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – are other signs that the dial may finally be shifting in Afghan women’s favour.
Akbar has been one of the leading voices campaigning to bring the case to the ICJ. Although she is appalled by what is happening to her motherland, she believes these judicial measures and the summit in Tirana will help ensure Afghan women’s voices are no longer silenced.
“We have a saying in Farsi,” said Akbar. “We say, ‘Drop by drop, you make a river.’ All of this will come together to become this river of hope and this river of defiance against the Taliban. The dream really is that we show the Taliban that the power of people everywhere in the world is with the women of Afghanistan and not with them.”
For Maryam, such developments are already reviving dreams that Afghan women’s rights and freedoms will one day be restored.
“I know that the suffering that women are enduring under the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime is unique,” she said.
She hopes the ongoing efforts, both by women like her inside the country and by those elsewhere in the world, will be enough.
“We are motivating and inspiring each other. We will win and the future will be ours – women’s.”
