After our editor’s slightly more upbeat newsletter last week, today we bring you crashing back to earth with a triple whammy of brazen assaults on free society.
 
We’ll start with the story that everyone knew was coming: Putin’s continued grip on power. The Russian “election”, in the heaviest inverted commas imaginable, delivered an 88% landslide victory for Vladimir Putin, keeping Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin in power until at least 2030. It is perhaps easy to win an election when you have no credible opposition and you rig the votes, as a video compilation of reams of paper being stuffed into boxes appears to show. The vote was also enforced in areas of occupied Ukraine. To make it particularly easy for those Ukrainians to vote, armed Russian soldiers took ballot boxes to some of their homes. For their safety, of course.
 
Second in this week’s trio of freedom-squashing events comes the passing of Article 23 in Hong Kong. It has been described as the National Security Law 2.0. The new law punishes those suspected of treason, insurrection, colluding with external forces or espionage. And — a staggeringly bad sign for a free society — it will allow trials to happen behind closed doors. The possible punishment? Life in prison.
 
And third, the latest event in the closing down of freedoms in Gaza. Al Jazeera journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, along with others, was reportedly violently arrested by the Israeli army at the Shifa Medical Complex from where he was reporting. According to Al Jazeera, Al-Ghoul was covering the Israeli army’s fourth raid on the hospital. A post on Al-Ghoul’s X/Twitter page said: “The army stormed Ismail's room, where he was with other journalists, where they were severely beaten and dragged before they were arrested and taken to an unknown destination.”
 
This is the bad news. But oppression never goes unchallenged.
 
In Russia and at Russian embassies around the world, at midday on the final day of voting, citizens turned out for the Noon Against Putin protest. They either voted against Putin (albeit for one of the Kremlin-curated alternative candidates) or spoiled their ballots. The creativity of these spoilings was quite something. Yulia Navalnaya, whose husband and Putin’s biggest rival Alexei Navalny died in an arctic prison mere weeks ago, joined thousands at the embassy in Berlin. People chanted her name. And then she handed in her vote, where she had made some adjustments to the ballot paper, graffitied with the leader she wanted for Russia: Alexei Navalny. Others followed her lead.
 
In Moscow, people layered voting slips between the flowers on Navalny’s grave. Another altered ballot was scrawled with “ballot for the matriarchy … my president is Nadya Pussy Riot”, complete with phallic doodles. A video published by The Times emerged of one woman setting fire to a polling booth and another filling a box of voting slips with ink. Both hung around and were swiftly detained.
  
As for Hong Kong — people across the world have spoken out against the new security law. A coalition of 88 parliamentarians and public figures condemned the legislation’s passage. Our editor-in-chief Jemimah Steinfeld said: “It is the worst form of legislation, simultaneously vague and broad aimed at instilling extra fear, extra caution and to catch as many people in its trap.”
 
On the same day the law passed, Index was at the European Parliament to witness the unveiling of the Pillar of Shame, which marks the Tiananmen Square massacre — the original having been removed by the Hong Kong authorities. A print of a Jimmy Lai painting by Index artists Lumli Lumlong (who have created the cover for our upcoming magazine) also took pride of place, paired with the words: “If a painting can overthrow a government, then the government must be very fragile.”
 
And to Gaza, International organisations, including Index, the CPJ and the IFJ piled on pressure for Gaza correspondent Ismail Al-Ghoul to be released from Israeli detention. After 12 hours he was. He later told Al Jazeera that Israeli forces destroyed media equipment, and described the terrifying scene of his arrest. With information so muzzled in Gaza, it is vital that journalists are protected. Nearly 100 journalists have been killed in the conflict since 7 October. Accurate information is more vital than ever to protect freedoms, but journalism has become a lethal occupation in the region.
 
While the mounting cases of stripped freedoms might feel overwhelming, there is always resistance against those who seek to silence. Those are the voices we champion at Index.
 
Katie Dancey-Downs, assistant editor