Contents – The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system

9 Apr 2025 | Afghanistan, Botswana, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Iran, Israel, Magazine Contents, Palestine, Russia, Slovakia, Somalia, Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Volume 54.01 Spring 2025

Contents

Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. Before Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccination in 1796, infectious diseases and viruses killed millions. The introduction of anaesthetic gases during surgical procedures in 1846 eliminated the excruciating pain of surgery. And before Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, people died unnecessarily from cuts and grazes.

But the benefits of modern medicine are not felt equally around the world. In this issue, we explore the forgotten patients in global healthcare settings – the marginalised groups who fall through the cracks or are actively shut out of healthcare provision, then ignored or silenced when they raise concerns.

Just like free speech, healthcare is an indisputable human right. But for many around the globe, both these rights are being removed in conjunction with each other. Through telling their stories, this edition aims to shine a light on these injustices and – we hope – empower more people to speak up for the right to health for themselves and others.

Up Front

A bitter pill to swallow: Sarah Dawood
Not all healthcare is made equal, and pointing this out can have serious consequences

The Index: Mark Stimpson
From elections in Romania to breaking encryption in the UK: a tour of the world’s most pressing free expression issues

Features

Rape, reputation and little recourse: Samridhi Kapoor, Hanan Zaffar
Indian universities have a sexual violence problem that no one is talking about

Georgian nightmare: Ruth Green
Russian-style laws are shutting down more conversations in Georgia, with academia feeling the heat

Botswana’s new era: Clemence Manyukwe
From brave lawyer to president – could the country’s new leader put human rights front and centre?

Venezuela’s prison problem: Catherine Ellis
The disputed new president has a way of dealing with critics – locking them up

Forbidden words: Salil Tripathi
The Satanic Verses is back in India’s bookshops. Or is it?

The art of resistance: Alessandra Bajec
A film, a graffiti archive and a stage play: three works changing the narrative in Tunisia

A tragic renaissance: Emily Couch
The pen is getting mightier and mightier in Ukraine

In the red zone: Alexandra Domenech
Conscription is just one of the fears of an LGBTQ+ visual artist in Russia

Demokratia dismantled: Georgios Samaras
The legacy of the Predator spyware scandal has left a dark stain on Greece

Elon musk’s year on X: Mark Stimpson
The biggest mystery about Musk: when does he sleep?

Keyboard warriors: Laura O’Connor
A band of women are fighting oppression in Myanmar through digital activism

Behind the bars of Saydnaya prison: Laura Silvia Battaglia
Unspeakable horrors unfolded at Syria’s most notorious prison, and now its survivors tell their stories

Painting a truer picture: Natalie Skowlund
Street art in one Colombian city has been sanitised beyond recognition

The reporting black hole: Fasil Aregay
Ethiopian journalists are allowed to report on new street lights, and little else

Special Report: The forgotten patients - Lost voices in the global healthcare system

Whistleblowing in an empty room: Martin Bright
Failures in England’s maternity services are shrouded in secrecy

An epidemic of corruption: Danson Kahyana
The Ugandan healthcare system is on its knees, but what does that matter to the rich and powerful?

Left speechless: Sarah Dawood
The horrors of war are leaving children in Gaza unable to speak

Speaking up to end the cut: Hinda Abdi Mohamoud
In Somalia, fighting against female genital mutilation comes at a high price

Doctors under attack: Kaya Genç
Turkey’s president is politicising healthcare, and medics are in the crosshairs

Denial of healthcare is censoring political prisoners – often permanently: Rishabh Jain, Alexandra Domenech, Danson Kahyana
Another page in the authoritarian playbook: deny medical treatment to jailed dissidents

The silent killer: Mackenzie Argent
A hurdle for many people using the UK’s National Health Service: institutional racism

Czechoslovakia’s haunting legacy: Katie Dancey-Downs
Roma women went into hospitals to give birth, and came out infertile

An inconvenient truth: Ella Pawlik
While Covid vaccines saved millions of lives, those with adverse reactions have been ignored

Punished for raising standards: Esther Adepetun
From misuse of money to misdirecting medicines, Nigerian healthcare is rife with corruption

Nowhere to turn: Zahra Joya
Life as they know it has been destroyed for women in Afghanistan, and healthcare provision is no different

Emergency in the children’s ward: Shaylim Castro Valderrama
The last thing parents of sick children expect is threats from militia

Comment

We need to talk about Sudan: Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Would “a battle of narratives” give the war more attention?

RFK Jr could be a disaster for American healthcare: Mark Honigsbaum
An anti-vaxxer has got US lives in his hands

The diamond age of death threats: Jemimah Steinfeld
When violent behaviour becomes business as usual

Free speech v the right to a fair trial: Gill Phillips
Are contempt of court laws fit for the digital age?

Culture

An unjust trial: Ariel Dorfman
A new short story imagines a kangaroo court of nightmares, where victims become defendants

Remember the past to save the future: Sarah Dawood, Diane Fahey
Published exclusively, the issues of antisemitism and colonialism are recorded through poetry

Where it’s more dangerous to carry a camera than a gun: Antonia Langford
A singer meets filmmakers in Yemen, and both take risks to tell her story

The fight for change isn’t straightforward: Shani Dhanda
The Last Word, on exclusion and intersectional discrimination

Bread, Work, Freedom

11 Sep 2024 | Afghanistan, Albania, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features

A summit on Afghan women’s rights is taking place in the Albanian capital Tirana this week. The gathering comes just two weeks after the Taliban’s "vice and virtue" laws banned women in Afghanistan speaking in public.

The All-Afghan Women’s Summit is in stark contrast to a United Nations meeting in Doha, Qatar at the end of June on the future of Afghanistan which excluded women at the insistence of the Taliban.

Over 100 Afghan women are taking part in the summit in Tirana, which is co-hosted by the governments of Albania and Spain and co-sponsored by the government of Switzerland.

The event is organised by Women for Afghanistan and chaired by Afghan campaigner and former politician Fawzia Koofi. The summit is designed to give a voice to Afghan women and work towards a manifesto for the future of Afghanistan.

Koofi said: “Whilst my sisters have suffered the most under the Taliban, they have also been the strongest voices standing up against oppression. This Summit will bring us together, consolidate our positions, and build unity and purpose towards a common vision for our country. We urge the international community to listen to our recommendations on a unified platform. There is simply no time to lose”.

The occasion was marked by the release of an anthem by the UK-based Aghan singer Elaha Soroor celebrating the strength and resilience of Afghan women. The song is sung to the words of a poem in Farsi based on the rallying cry of the women’s protest movement in Afghanistan: “Bread, Work, Freedom! Education, Work, Freedom!”

“This poem is an expression of a woman’s struggle for autonomy, identity, and liberation from the constraints imposed by tradition and patriarchal authority,” Soror explained. “As the poem progresses, she reclaims her power, embracing her own identity and rejecting patience as a virtue that no longer serves her.”

Index has consistently campaigned for women’s rights in Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the organisation has put pressure on the British government to honour its promises to Afghan journalists and women.

Three years ago, we helped organise an open letter to The Times calling on the UK government to intervene on behalf of Afghan actors, writers, musicians and film makers targeted by the Taliban. Since then, we have run a series of articles about life under the Taliban regime.

This article from February 2023 was written anonymously about one female journalist who suffered assault and starvation during her escape from Afghanistan. Thankfully, the writer concerned, Spozhmai Maani, is now safely in France, thanks to the support of Index and other international organisations. We were delighted to announce in January 2024 that Spozhmai had won our Moments of Freedom award. Others have not been so fortunate, The crackdown on journalists continues and the latest laws effectively criminalise free expression for women.

The enforced silence of Afghanistan’s women

30 Aug 2024 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Newsletters

The silencing of Afghanistan’s women is now complete.

This week, Afghanistan’s Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice came into force.

Women’s voices are now considered as awrah, or intimate parts, and may only be experienced in cases of necessity. Women must refrain from raising their voices and they are forbidden from being overheard reading aloud, chanting or singing outside their homes.

The law also dictates that women’s bodies and faces must be fully covered.

“It is haram for unrelated men to look at the bodies or faces of unrelated women, and it is haram for unrelated women to look at unrelated men,” the law says.

It is the Taliban’s ultimate denial of women’s freedom of expression and is an all too predictable outcome of the withdrawal of Western troops from the country in 2021.

The law, ratified by Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, applies to all individuals living in Afghanistan including foreign residents.

Punishment for these “crimes” will be carried out by the Taliban’s Muhtaseebs or morality police who have the authority to detain individuals for up to three days on the flimsiest of evidence.

These “vice and virtue” laws also severely restrict religious practices, outline what individuals can and cannot do in their sex lives and allow the Taliban to regulate both state and private media outlets. Publishing images of living beings is now also forbidden and people are now forbidden from storing photos or videos of others on their phones.

The human rights community has been quick to denounce the new laws.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani said the new policies were contrary to international human rights law and “completely erase women’s presence in public – silencing their voices, and depriving them of their individual autonomy, effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows”.

“Disempowering and rendering invisible and voiceless half the population of Afghanistan will only worsen the human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country. Rather, this is a time to bring together all the people of Afghanistan, irrespective of their gender, religion or ethnicity, to help resolve the many challenges the country faces.”

These new laws go against everything we stand for at Index on Censorship and show a complete failure of the West’s foreign policies. And it's the women of Afghanistan who have paid the highest price.

Burkina Faso has chosen the tool of the tyrant

3 May 2024 | Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burma, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hong Kong, News and features, Opinion, Ruth's blog

With the world absorbed in too much news some important stories in the world of freedom of expression can be lost. As we mark World Press Freedom Day it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what is really happening around the world, away from the daily news agenda, from the ‘foreign agent’ bill in Georgia, to the restrictions being placed on journalists in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Hong Kong and of course Afghanistan.

It’s one of these unheard stories which I want to focus on this week. In the ongoing global struggle for press freedom, Burkina Faso finds itself embroiled in controversy once again. The recent suspension of foreign media outlets over their coverage of a damning report accusing the country's army of civilian massacres underscores an appalling trend towards censorship and repression.

The report, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW), alleges that Burkina Faso's military was responsible for the killing of 223 civilians in retaliation for their support of armed Islamists. This accusation has been vehemently denied by the military government, which seized power in a coup in 2022 with the promise of quelling the Islamist insurgency plaguing the nation.

But instead of choosing light and transparency the government has chosen the tool of the tyrant - censorship.

Foreign media outlets such as the BBC, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle have been suspended, their websites blocked, and broadcasts halted for daring to report on HRW's findings. This outrageous approach to silencing truth and dissent stifles the flow of information and undermines the fundamental principles of freedom of expression.

The joint statement from the governments of the United States and United Kingdom unequivocally condemns Burkina Faso's actions, emphasising the importance of an unfettered press in fostering informed public discourse. As we mark World Press Freedom Day, these acts of censorship serve as a stark reminder of the critical role that media plays in holding power to account and safeguarding democracy.

The suspensions imposed by Burkina Faso's Superior Council of Communication not only violate the rights of journalists but also deprive the Burkinabe people of access to independent and accurate news. By blocking HRW's website and restricting media coverage of their report, the government effectively shields itself from scrutiny and accountability.

Such tactics are not unique to Burkina Faso; they are part of a broader global trend towards authoritarianism and censorship. Across the world, journalists face intimidation, harassment, and violence simply for doing their jobs. This week, the BBC World Service has revealed for the first time that 310 of its journalists are living in exile.

The international community must stand in solidarity with journalists and media organisations under attack. Advocating for freedom of expression is not only a matter of principle but also a practical necessity for the functioning of democratic societies. When the voices of the oppressed are silenced, tyranny reigns unchecked.

As the world marks World Press Freedom Day, let us reaffirm our commitment to defending the rights of journalists everywhere. In the face of adversity, their courage and resilience serve as a beacon of hope for a brighter and more just future.