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RightsCon 2025 took place in Taipei in Taiwan. Photo: RightsCon When your job is to campaign against censorship, sometimes censorship comes for you. And that’s exactly what has just happened to me, and indeed many others in my field. I was supposed to go to Zambia today. I had meticulously planned my trip. I’d filled out forms and booked airport transfers. My suitcase was half packed. I’d even started my course of anti-malarial pills. I would have been one of thousands heading to the capital city Lusaka for the RightsCon event which was meant to take place next week. Organised by Access Now, RightsCon is one of the largest and most important annual conferences on the intersection of human rights and technology in the world. It’s a special event, attracting a mix of leading digital rights specialists, researchers, policymakers, journalists and technologists. Except it was cancelled at the eleventh hour. Not because of any logistical mess-up, but because the Zambian government clearly didn’t want us there. I’m going to call their intervention out for what it is – censorship. Each year, Access Now carefully choose where they host RightsCon. In 2025 it was in Taipei in Taiwan. While staging the conference there was not without its complications (some were unable to attend following the withdrawal of USAID), the event was still buzzing; rich, rewarding conversations and connections flowed. This year Access Now wanted the conference to be more accessible to people from the Global South. Zambia was chosen for this reason and likely too because in Africa it’s known as one of the more stable countries. That calculation appeared to pay off. Last week the Zambian government issued a statement welcoming the event. Then came the U-turn. First on Tuesday when Zambia’s Minister of Technology and Science, Felix Mutati, said the conference needed to be postponed to ensure it “fully [aligns] with national procedures, diplomatic protocols, and the broader objective of fostering a balanced and consensus-driven platform for dialogue.” He added: “In particular, certain invited speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances, which have not yet been concluded.” Yesterday, the Zambian government doubled down. “The postponement was necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure of critical information related to key thematic issues proposed for discussion during the Summit,” said Thabo Kawana, the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Information and Media. “Such disclosure is essential to ensure full alignment with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest considerations.” The statement is extraordinary. What does alignment with “Zambia’s national values” mean? It’s the nebulous language autocrats often use to justify punishing their critics. Could the “thematic issues” relate to discussions about LGBTQ+ rights in a country which criminalises same sex relationships and routinely detains and beats up gay people?  As for “policy priorities”, could it concern Zambia’s general elections, due to take place in August? The government has been criticised over recent constitutional changes that many believe extend its power. Other policies are leading to a shrinking civic space. Several people have been imprisoned for criticising President Hakainde Hichilema. Or could it concern Zambia’s relationship with China? Last Friday they signed an agreement to work more closely together. The relationship was already tight – Zambia is the first African country to allow mining companies to pay in yuan, China’s currency. Beijing would not be a fan of RightsCon and Beijing has a record of interference. Consider too the “broader public interest considerations”. Let’s get real. RightsCon is an event for nerds and wonks, the opposite of a rowdy crowd. Besides, wouldn’t the thousands of travellers to Lusaka be good for the hospitality industry, part of any sensible “broader public interest consideration”? The reasons given smell bad because they are. RightsCon have now formally cancelled the event. They’ve said that they “do not recommend registered participants travel to Lusaka for RightsCon.” I’m reading this as a warning – it’s not safe. I was looking forward to visiting Zambia and getting under the belly of the country or at least trying to. UNESCO, capitalising on the crowd that would be gathered there, also planned their annual World Press Freedom Day Global conference to happen just before RightsCon in Lusaka. I was part of events at both, alongside a separate workshop on encryption. I was excited to connect with people from last year’s RightsCon and to meet new ones. Solidarity is essential and especially right now, with the connections made at conferences like these invaluable. I was buoyed by the prospect of all the knowledge-sharing and to hear stories that resonate more when said to someone’s face rather than in pixelated form. There’s a reason these events have gone back to being predominantly in-person. I feel sorry for the Access Now team who would have spent months working on the programme. I feel bad for the attendees from Zambia and nearby countries who RightsCon was hoping to support. I feel guilty for the hotels and restaurants which went from being fully booked to available. Mostly of all I feel very sad about all the conversations that should have happened and now won’t. Hopefully RightsCon will be back with a bang next year. But nothing can or will fill the hole this year’s cancellation has left. READ MORE

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When your job is to campaign against censorship, sometimes censorship comes for you. And that’s exactly what has just happened…

Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has had his Kuwaiti citizenship revoked. Photo: Mohamed Nanabhay/CC BY 2.0 One early April morning, the newsroom of a Kuwaiti television channel skipped all mention of the sirens that had wailed through the night and disrupted everyone’s sleep. American and Israeli missiles had been raining on Iran for weeks, and Kuwait was one of multiple neighbours Tehran had been lashing out against. But the crew, like many others in the tiny state, had learned that the night’s developments were not free to speak about. Najwa*, a Kuwaiti journalist with more than two decades of experience and part of that broadcaster’s team, says she has never seen censorship this bad. “The ceiling of freedom is completely shattered,” she tells Index on Censorship by phone, asking to be referred to by a pseudonym for fear of persecution. She is not alone. Since US-Israel hostilities on Iran began on 28 February, a sweeping crackdown on war-related speech has consumed the Arabian Gulf. Journalists have been silenced, residents detained, and the basic act of filming the sky – plumes of smoke, the aftermath of a strike – has become a prosecutable offence across multiple Gulf states. The legal architecture enabling these crackdowns predates the war. The conflict has provided governments a pretext to activate it at scale. The most visible case is that of Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a prominent dual US-Kuwaiti journalist who was detained in Kuwait on 2 March after posting a geolocated video of a jet crash linked to the conflict. After global calls for his release, Shihab-Eldin has since been acquitted, but stripped of his citizenship, a tactic aggressively deployed by Kuwaiti government in recent year, impacting over 60,000 people, according to estimates. The outcome has been the complete silencing of critics, including those who were previously vocal who fear facing this fate. The practice, justified by the government in Shihab-Eldin’s case as the result his illegal dual nationality, affect not only Shihab-Eldin, but his siblings. But Shihab-Eldin’s case is part of a much larger story of media clampdown that has received little international attention. “There is no official figure, but it is informally circulated that approximately 1,200 people have been detained by state security –  either for filming strike locations or for expressing sympathy with Iran,” says Najwa. For Kuwait, the current climate carries a particular weight. The small Gulf state was long regarded as the region’s most democratic: it had the Arabian Gulf’s most combative freely-elected parliament, a constitution that meaningfully constrained the ruling family and a media spectrum that reflected and responded to that political pluralism. For decades, journalists pushed boundaries their counterparts elsewhere in the Gulf could not approach. That reputation began unravelling in 2024, when the then-new Emir suspended parliament indefinitely alongside key articles of the constitution, removing the most significant institutional check on executive power, and with it much of the legal and political cover that had allowed a relatively open press to function. It is against that backdrop that the war arrived. Najwa describes a media environment now operating under unspoken martial law. Official information about the war is channeled exclusively through a daily military briefing, prepared by military and security apparatuses and delivered on screen by a uniformed spokesperson. The briefings offer the numbers of drones and missiles intercepted. They make no mention of strike locations, infrastructure damage, or Iranian strikes on Israel. Kuwait’s media, Najwa says, has been instructed to adopt the American narrative framework wholesale. Any deviation carries grave consequences. For a country where roughly 30% of its 1.4 million people are Shiite and therefore carry close ties to Iran as the world’s preeminent Shia state, this war is a particular conundrum. On 6 April, a local press cited official Kuwaiti statements warning against content that “incites sectarian discourse” and urging the avoidance of “provocative content online.” “State security has expanded its net to include the charge of sympathising with Iran,” Najwa says. A “like” on a post, or a comment, can be interpreted as sympathy with the enemy and referred to state security for interrogation. She gives the specific example of Zainab Dashti, a broadcaster and former freelance presenter at state television, who posted opinions on X that authorities deemed pro-Iranian. According to Najwa, Dashti was detained by state security in early March and has not been released. Two other Ministry of Information broadcasters were informally suspended from work because of their association with her. Old tweets from 2012 and 2014, praising Hezbollah at a time when the organisation was not yet criminalised in Kuwait, were surfaced and used against them. Index on Censorship could not independently confirm these allegations. But Najwa is unequivocal: “Even insinuation can be reframed as sympathy with Iran.” The situation is so acute that Najwa deleted her WhatsApp conversation with this reporter the moment it ended. “Even this conversation with you,” she said before hanging up, “after we finish, I will delete it. Because at any moment, if someone searches my phone – at a checkpoint, anywhere –  and sees this conversation, I could be referred to state security. And when people are referred to state security, there is no fixed charge, no fixed timeline. There are people who have been there since the beginning of March and have not yet appeared before a court.” The pattern is regional. In Saudi Arabia – Iran’s arch-rival and competitor for regional hegemony – an expatriate journalist who has reported from the kingdom for over six years describes conditions as unprecedented. “We are not told which targets were struck, and sources refuse to share details,” they told Index, asking not to be named. “We learned from unofficial sources that workers at petroleum facilities are not allowed to bring in their phones, so as not to capture the scale and scope of damage. People are terrified of taking pictures. Street banners warn against filming anything, disseminating news, or distributing so-called rumours. There are no clear and direct instructions hindering journalists, but the overall environment is crippling.” The legal framework enabling these crackdowns, says Inès Osman, Executive Director of MENA Rights Group, predates the war but has been radically redeployed. “What has changed is the scope of who is considered a target and what is considered political. Ordinary citizens posting a video of smoke on the horizon did not necessarily see themselves as engaging in an act that could get them prosecuted. Authorities are now treating war-related content as falling within ‘endangering national security’ or ‘harming the reputation of the state’, which carry heavy sentences.” Osman points to a deeper motivation. “Gulf states have spent millions marketing themselves as stable, modern, investable. Any narrative that runs against that is ultimately threatening their very foundation,” she says, referring to booming economies in Saudi and the UAE, competing over foreign investments, and other smaller ones vying to catch up. The war, she argues, has made explicit a bargain many residents, particularly expatriates, had allowed themselves to forget. “We deliver security and prosperity, but you need to keep silent.” The numbers are stark. In the UAE, Abu Dhabi police have reportedly arrested hundreds for sharing footage of strikes and interceptions, with at least 35 individuals receiving orders related to “misleading” videos and reports suggesting up to 70 British nationals may face charges. In Qatar, more than 300 people have reportedly been detained for sharing war imagery. In Saudi Arabia, 19 journalists have been detained alongside blanket photography bans, backed by an official campaign warning that sharing such footage “serves the enemy”. A March 10 report by Reporters Without Borders documented intensifying restrictions across the region. The United Nations has raised alarm over civic repression. Even as a fragile ceasefire takes hold, Osman is not optimistic. “History has shown that emergency measures almost always become permanent. The post-9/11 counter-terrorism framework was kept and significantly expanded, well after the original justification faded. Even if the bans are formally lifted, they will leave behind a climate of fear and self-censorship.” In Kuwait, Najwa puts it more plainly. The war, she says, may pause. The silence it has enforced may not. READ MORE

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One early April morning, the newsroom of a Kuwaiti television channel skipped all mention of the sirens that had wailed…