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Dear Friend,
Writers witness the truths of our time. In the past year especially, writers have played an essential role during the pandemic, analyzing and critiquing government responses, documenting personal experiences, and inspiring us to imagine a better future.
PEN America's Freedom to Write Index provides a count of the writers and public intellectuals imprisoned around the world during the previous calendar year. Since its launch last year, the Freedom to Write Index has helped to inform the greater public about threats to writers around the world, telling the stories of individuals who have been silenced and detained for their words, and shining a light on the countries that present the gravest threats to writers and public intellectuals. Read the 2020 Index report here, and click here to check out coverage of the report in The Washington Post.
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Among the findings of this year’s report:
- For the second year in a row, China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey topped PEN America’s list of the world’s worst jailers of writers and public intellectuals.
- In 2020, at least 273 writers, academics, and public intellectuals in 35 countries were in prison or unjustly held in detention in connection with their writing, their work, or related activism. This represents a 9 percent increase over the prior year, signaling a serious deterioration for the climate for free expression globally.
- The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened free expression in many countries, as governments have used the pandemic as cover to further restrict speech, with laws being put in place criminalizing “false information” or “rumors” about the pandemic, and in some cases even criminalizing criticizing the government itself.
- Meanwhile, numbers increased in Iran, Vietnam, and Egypt, and expanded dramatically in Belarus, which accounted for zero cases in the 2019 Index, but now ranks as the fifth worst jailer of writers and intellectuals, with 18 documented cases in 2020—or some 7 percent of the total—as a result of a brutal post-election crackdown on mass protests that has targeted writers, translators, artists, and other cultural figures. Belarus is the only new country to make it into this year’s top ten list of the world’s worst jailers of writers and public intellectuals.
Join PEN America for an online forum exploring the Index’s findings and trends in further depth, this Friday, April 23 from 12:00 – 1:15 pm ET. Register here.
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Alongside the annual Index, PEN America also publishes the Writers at Risk database, which contains details of each of the writers in our 2020 Index along with hundreds of other cases of writers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals under threat around the world, including historical cases that PEN America has worked on from 1987 onwards. This database offers researchers, rights advocates, and the public a wealth of actionable evidence of ongoing global threats to free expression. Explore the Writers at Risk Database here.
We hope you will explore the Freedom to Write Index and the Writers at Risk Database, and as always, we thank you for your support.
Sincerely,
Karin Deutsch Karlekar
Director, Free Expression at Risk Programs
PEN America
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PEN America is deeply grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Freedom to Write Index and Writers at Risk Database. We also extend our thanks to PEN International—both the Secretariat staff and the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC)—for its extensive casework and collaboration on this project.
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