This week Vladimir Kara-Murza marked his 42nd birthday in a Russian prison. As an activist, historian and journalist, he represents everything President Putin has done his best to destroy: freedom of thought, the right to protest injustice and his country’s heroic tradition of dissent. For Vladimir Kara-Murza is above all a dissident. The US businessman Bill Browder told Index’s Francis Clarke this week that Putin has elevated the status of his great friend by targeting him with a 25-year sentence. Browder believes Kara-Murza should be seen in the same light as Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela.

This week, Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, announced that her husband was being transferred “right before his birthday to prevent him from receiving words of support from around the world. Transfer is a very, maybe even the most, dangerous period in the life of a political prisoner.” His lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, told Index he believed he was being sent to a detention centre in Omsk, Siberia, but that this might not be his final destination.

In an interview released by Browder on Twitter/X this week, Evgenia explained that Kara-Murza is a politician, journalist, historian and filmmaker – a renaissance man. She added that he was “formed by the idea of Soviet dissidents”. He now finds himself in the very same Gulag system as his dissident heroes. His four-part documentary They Chose Freedom (2005), about the generation of opposition figure who inspired him, remains a moving testament to those who went before him. It was perhaps inevitable that he would eventually follow their path into detention.

But just as Browder believes the pursuit of Kara-Murza has boosted his position as a dissident figure, the fact the regime has moved him to stop him receiving messages of solidarity on his birthday shows how nervous it is of his international network of support. It also demonstrates how important these messages are.

We at Index know just how important it is to remind dissidents in jail that we have not forgotten them. From when the magazine launched in 1972 we have published letters from the incarcerated and have in turn smuggled our own messages to them.

Today we continue this tradition. Our work in Belarus is centred on our campaign Letters from Lukashenka’s Prisoners. On 9 October it will be 1000 days since our former colleague Andrei Aliaksandrau was detained in Belarus for supporting his fellow journalists and we will continue to bring the world’s attention to the crackdown on independent media under the Lukashenka regime. You can read Andrei’s letter here.

This kind of work is not without complications and risks. Just last month, journalist, historian and cultural activist Larysa Shchyrakova was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony for discrediting Belarus and promoting extremist activity. In 2021 Shchyrakova told Index: “There is now a fear – and sometimes terror – in Belarus because of this repression of journalism and civil society.” Index has to tread a delicate line here because we believe Shchyrakova’s work for Index may have been used against her in her trial. But we also know how important international solidarity will now be following her incarceration. 

The same is true for Jimmy Lai, the human rights defender who is due to stand trial later this year in Hong Kong. Lai is the 75-year-old businessman who founded the independent news service Apple Daily, which was forced to close by the Chinese authorities in 2021. This is why we launched the Postcard for Jimmy campaign to send messages of support while he awaits trial. The campaign builds on an earlier campaign Index was part of, working with schoolchildren in the USA. They sent postcards to Lai and we were told that the postcards arrived in Lai’s Hong Kong prison within three months of being sent, that Lai was allowed to read one daily and that this enabled him to have regular contact with the outside world. Sometimes the greatest acts of solidarity are the smallest.

Index on Censorship was founded as a direct response to the trials of dissidents in Soviet Russia during the Brezhnev era. Fifty years later we are proud to support those like Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Aliaksandrau, Larysa Shchyrakova and Jimmy Lai who keep the flame of resistance alive.
 
Martin Bright, editor-at-large

An end to the ‘desperate situation’ for Europe’s journalists?

French media is not immune to bought influence. Photo: besopha

Journalists at the Journal du Dimanche, France’s leading Sunday newspaper, have suffered a radical change of regime. In the spring, Vivendi, owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré, got the go-ahead to buy the publishing giant Lagardère, including the JDD. Bolloré publicly denies any political interest. But as with his acquisitions of CNews in 2016 and the magazine Paris Match last year, the buy-out was followed by a sharp turn in the editorial orientation of the JDD towards the far right.

The situation in France mirrors what is happening in other European countries, write Sigrid Melchior and Harald Schumann. Read their report here.

Online Safety Bill loophole opens door to unprecedented investigatory powers

A new report from Index on Censorship raises the alarm over proposed legislation that could lead to unprecedented and chilling surveillance of British citizens under the Investigatory Powers Act.

Clause 122 of the Online Safety Bill provides Ofcom the means to break encrypted messaging services through ‘technology notices’ served without legal oversight. Once ‘Accredited Technology’ is used to break encryption, the Home Office has the power to use “bulk surveillance warrants” under the Investigatory Powers Act: providing access to encrypted private messages en masse for the first time.

It is a topic that our CEO Ruth Anderson covers in her weekly blog post.

Send a postcard of support to Jimmy Lai

Left: Painting by Lumli Lumlong. Right: Messages 1..." (2015) by the Hong Kong visual artist, curator and writer, Mei Yuk Wong

Jimmy Lai is a 75-year-old businessman and founder and publisher of Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper that was forced to close in 2021 after the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown on pro-democracy protests in the city. A longtime critic of the party, Lai is one of the most high-profile pro-democracy campaigners to have been arrested in Hong Kong since the Chinese government enacted the National Security Law in June 2020. Lai was charged with violating the National Security Law in August 2020. His trial for that case is scheduled for later this year, but since his arrest he has been convicted on separate charges of fraud and organising illegal protests.

Index is now launching a campaign to allow Jimmy's well-wishers to send him postcards containing messages of support which we will forward to him in prison. Find out how to take part here.