2025: the free speech year
Reflecting on 2025 one might argue that it’s been the year free speech was well and truly put on the map. That’s not to say people didn’t care about it before. Just that it’s gone from being somewhat niche to the conversation of today. On the one hand I welcome the attention – we do what we do at Index because we believe the right to freedom of expression is a foundational right. On the other hand the extra interest has been driven by escalating threats and the constant, often disingenuous referencing of the term. Either way as we end 2025 it feels only right to highlight some of the free speech events from the free speech year. Please note this is far from an exhaustive list; if a case is missed it’s not because it doesn’t matter.
The highs
That hug between Belarus opposition leader Siarhei Tsikhanouski and his wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, at an airport in Lithuania after he was freed from prison. Of course he should never have been arrested and the terms of his release are terrible, but that doesn’t detract from it being a good moment. His release was made all the better by the fact it was ahead of his sentence, as was the case for many others freed from prison in Belarus over the summer and just last weekend. Then there was the freeing of activist and writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah in Egypt, the novelist Boualem Sansal in Algeria, Leeds student Salma al-Shehab in Saudi Arabia and Palestinian human rights lawyer Diala Ayesh. We’ve campaigned for all these people and have worked directly with some. It’s great when we can “retire” these cases.
We welcomed news of the conviction of two men involved in a murder-for-hire scheme targeting Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad. Transnational repression is growing and yet this showed that justice doesn’t always allude the victims. We were pleased that the National Library of Scotland recognised that the book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht shouldn’t have been excluded from its library display and put it on show and were encouraged when the UK government dropped its demand to access Apple global users' data (although they’re still coming after UK data).
The age of protest has been revived. This has also been the year of Gen Z street uprisings round the world, mainly against government corruption and unemployment, with young people feeling they have nothing to lose. For better or worse governments in Bulgaria and Nepal have been toppled. As a colleague said to me it’s a reassuring sign to anyone who thought the youth were just mindlessly scrolling on their phones, but it’s also a warning to leaders that they need to allow freedom of expression and openness otherwise they will be organised against. And several countries, like Poland, Zambia and Brazil, reported modest improvements democratically, for now at least.
The lows
Iran executed more political prisoners this year than in any other year since 1988; North Korea scaled up executions too, including for people sharing foreign films and TV dramas; a Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathalee, who was involved in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land, was killed, as were journalists in Gaza. The “world’s forgotten war” in Sudan went from bad to worse, a story we only know in fragments because of the risks of speaking out. It’s a similar case in Haiti, which the UN described this year as ‘”an unending horror story”, and where people live in fear of the increasingly violent and powerful gangs.
In 2025 women living under Taliban rule were plunged further into misery following a raft of new edicts. It’s no longer hyperbole to say most now live in a form of domestic prison and we are doing all we can to support them through Our Letters from Afghan Women project. As for political prisoners, there are still too many. Our former colleague from Belarus, Andrei Aliaksandrau, is still in jail, as is Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong. We wanted to see both men reunited with their families in time for Christmas. Instead they’ll spend another festive season behind bars. And more people joined their ranks across the world – in Russia, China, Tunisia, El Salvador and Venezuela – to name just a few countries that have filled up their jails with people whose only crime is to speak out.
But it was perhaps the democratic backsliding in countries like India, Georgia and the USA that was particularly notable this year. In the USA, which once prided itself as being a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, protesters were attacked and disappeared, words were banned, books too, universities and press sued, presenters sacked. This matters. It matters for those impacted, from the minority groups who are often the most targeted to those speaking up against the government or the president and wondering if they’ll land on a blacklist for doing so. It also matters because it’s America. When the leader of “the free world” acts badly others follow.
So that’s a wrap 2025, on balance a very bad year for free speech.
A respected journalist once described Index to me as “not a soft toy factory”. Indeed we’re not and in 2026 we’ll prove that even more. We do though have a soft side. We’re a community, and I want to end this year thanking all of you who’ve been part of it. My gratitude to you for reading our work, sharing it, reporting for us, and supporting us and the causes we champion in all kinds of ways. When we come together change happens. Let’s make sure that next year the highs outstrip the lows.
Jemimah Steinfeld
CEO, Index on Censorship
