Friday, 31 October 2025
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** The dissident family challenging Slovakia's Robert Fico
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In November 2018 I was invited to Bratislava to attend the Central European Forum. The list of participants was impressive. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and then only an emerging voice, was speaking. So was the extraordinary Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. And also Edouard Louis, the young French literary sensation, who had just written a book about why his working-class father had turned to the far-right.

The event – organised annually since 2009 – in Bratislava and timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, was unashamedly intellectual. It had a mad chaos, where ideas were exciting. The fact that the theme was Demand the Impossible, the slogan of the 1968 Paris street protests, made the occasion all the more exhilarating. The forum is the brainchild of Marta Šimečková, a small middle-aged lady in a large coat who appeared like a whirlwind in the foyer of our baroque hotel with her little rescue dog in tow. She has a talent for making everyone from the lowliest attendee to the most famous writer feel welcome and special.

There was hope in the air then in Slovakia. The Prime Minister, Robert Fico, had just stepped down after street protests triggered by the assassination of the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée.

Much has changed today. Fico is back in power – and has turned his fire on Šimečková. He has accused her of being a fraudster and a parasite by embezzling the public funds for her forums. She has replied in kind with an eviscerating open letter ([link removed]) . But Fico’s intentions are clear: to close down the international discussions she is so brilliant at convening. There are other reasons for Fico’s attacks too.

Šimečková is no ordinary conference organiser. She is the daughter-in-law of the prominent Czech-Slovak dissident Milan Šimečka, whose writings Index published as samizdat during the Cold War. In an essay from 1981 ([link removed]) intended as an introduction to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he writes how he feels that his story is the same as that of the anti-hero Winston and that his feelings and experience in communist Czechoslovakia mirror almost exactly those of the fictional character. A graphic biography, Comrade Dissident ([link removed]) , has just been published in Slovak.

Šimečková’s husband is the writer and political commentator Martin, and their son Michal, is now Slovakia’s opposition leader. They are dissident royalty.

While Fico and his young hawks in government have been cosying up to Putin and pursuing pro-Russia politics, Michal Šimečka has taken the Ukrainian side, with tens of thousands joining rallies earlier this year to protest the official pro-Russian line. Fico’s government has gone further, adopting legislation which tightens the rules for nongovernmental organisations, a move critics say resembles Kremlin-style laws. Fico’s government has also attacked the independent media and rolled back LGBTQ rights, for which Michal is a champion. So the attack on Šimečková is also an attack on Michal Šimečka, Fico’s main political opponent, and an attempt to discredit the whole family.

This November Šimečková remains defiant. The Central European Forum will go ahead as usual on 16 and 17 November in Bratislava with prominent figures in Western literature and liberal political thought invited.

But for the first time since 2001, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on 17 November isn’t a public holiday. Fico, who has always claimed the date wasn’t significant and that he was retiling his bathroom at the time, abolished it this year as part of his austerity measures.

Sally Gimson

Acting editor, Index on Censorship


** More from Index
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New report: Urgent reform needed on media freedom in Bulgaria ([link removed])

Modest progress has been made but government must do more ([link removed])

From Tanzania to Vietnam: The week in free expression ([link removed])

A round-up of the key stories covering censorship and free expression from the past seven days ([link removed])

An exceptional editor: a tribute to Judith Vidal-Hall ([link removed])

Jo Glanville pays tribute to former Index editor who reinvented the magazine after the Cold War ([link removed])

Do the dead have free expression? ([link removed])

Index explores the issues around whether AI should be used to bring the deceased back to life ([link removed])

Israeli society is not a monolith ([link removed])

Standing Together is working on the front line of Israel’s battered peace movement ([link removed])

Remembering Ivan Klíma ([link removed])

We honour the late-Czech novelist and playwright by sharing his short story ([link removed])

The trauma of being Lukashenka’s prisoner ([link removed])

Index went to meet a group of Belarusian political prisoners released this summer ([link removed])

There’s only room for one god in China ([link removed])

Xi Jinping is now cracking down hard on churchgoers in the People’s Republic ([link removed])

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** New report: From Survivor to Defendant
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A new report, From Survivor to Defendant: How the law is being weaponised to silence victims of sexual violence, by Index on Censorship reveals how survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the UK and Ireland are being silenced through abusive legal actions known as strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs).
READ THE REPORT ([link removed])


** From Tanzania to Vietnam: The week in free expression ([link removed])
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** >> TANZANIA: ([link removed]) Military deployed and curfew imposed on election day ([link removed])
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** >> NIGERIA: ([link removed]) Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s US visa revoked ([link removed])
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** >> USA: ([link removed]) White House uses video game memes to recruit for ICE ([link removed])
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** >> IRAN: ([link removed]) Rock band shows sparks of rebellion ([link removed])
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** >> VIETNAM: ([link removed]) BBC journalist barred from leaving country ([link removed])
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** >> RUSSIA/BELARUS: ([link removed]) Over 100 media workers said to be behind bars ([link removed])
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** >> USA/ASIA: ([link removed]) Radio Free Asia halts news operations amid shutdown ([link removed])
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** Flashback
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The long view ([link removed])

by Judith Vidal-Hall ([link removed])

Volume 41, Issue 1 ([link removed])

Last week, we said goodbye to pioneering former editor of Index on Censorship, Judith Vidal-Hall, who died on 23 October 2025. Read the moving tribute to her life and legacy here ([link removed]) .

Under her leadership as editor, Vidal-Hall reinvented Index’s magazine following the end of the Cold War. Today, we look back on her piece recalling the day censorship was proclaimed dead and buried in 1992.Read the story here. ([link removed])


** Support our work
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The world is becoming more authoritarian and our work calling out human rights abuses and promoting freedom of expression in countries such as Slovakia, Israel and Belarus has never been more important.

By supporting Index on Censorship today, you can help us in our work with censored artists, jailed musicians, journalists under threat and dissidents facing torture or worse.

Please donate today ([link removed])

Photos by: (Central European Forum 2009) Peter Župník/Wiki Commons; (Tearing down the Berlin Wall, 1989) Sipa Press/Rex Features

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