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News delivers the latest updates and breaking developments on free expression, digital rights, and censorship issues worldwide. Stay informed on key events, policy changes, and stories shaping the global conversation about free speech and open dialogue.

Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, the publisher of shuttered Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, during an interview in 2020. Photo: AP Photo/Vincent Yu/Alamy For simply documenting Iranian attacks, hundreds of people have been detained in the United Arab Emirates, all charged under the UAE’s draconian cybercrime laws. They could be jailed for life. Around 70 of those are UK citizens. There should be an outcry from our government. But is there? No, none. No minister has made a public statement condemning the arrests. Instead the Foreign Office has issued statements like this one calling the Gulf countries “our partners” and ones along these lines that offer support to get overseas Brits home – that is, those who aren’t in prison. According to the Foreign Office’s own admission, it’s only offering consular assistance to a select few of the 70 incarcerated. The families of those detained are now voicing their frustration and calling the response inadequate. They’re right but sadly their cries are likely to fall on deaf ears. I cannot tell you the number of meetings and conferences I’ve attended with current and former hostages and their families to discuss the UK government’s woeful response to the plight of people held abroad. Sebastian Lai and a legal team at Doughty Street Chambers have been asking the British government for years to put pressure on China to release Jimmy Lai, who’s been held since 2020; the relatives of Jagtar Singh Johal, a human rights defender from Dumbarton in Scotland held by the Indian government, have been campaigning even longer. Both men are British nationals. The UK should have moved mountains to get them home. But no government has even moved a mound. It’s a trend that goes back decades. Jill Morrell became a fixture of the news in the 1980s after her boyfriend, British journalist John McCarthy, was kidnapped in Beirut. While he was eventually released, he lost years of his life to jail and it was the dogged persistence of Morrell which forced ministers to act. We should be ashamed by all this, even more so when you consider that countries like Ireland and Australia have a better track record. I could joke that a British passport might get you into lots of countries but it sure as hell won’t get you out of them.  Except it’s not the remotest bit funny. A 2023 report by the foreign affairs select committee, which took evidence from Richard and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the families of other political prisoners, condemned the Foreign Office’s attitude as secretive, inconsistent and built on an erroneous belief that quiet diplomacy works. Three years on and it’s hard to see any change. Why exactly are we so callous about our political prisoners abroad? We at Index simply don’t know, though we do have theories (prioritisation of trade over human rights, the diminishing stature of Britain on the global stage, political football around dual nationals, a fear of giving in to hostage-taking – to list four). All we know for certain is the terrible impact of our policy on those incarcerated and on their families. What a sorry state. We have a group of people languishing overseas for simply exercising their free expression rights, and successive governments including our current one which appear unwilling to defend their right to do so. READ MORE

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For simply documenting Iranian attacks, hundreds of people have been detained in the United Arab Emirates, all charged under the…

Budapest, Hungary. 13th Apr, 2026. Peter Magyar waves the Hungarian flag after his speech during the TISZA party’s election night event in Budapest. Photo: ZUMA Press/Alamy The Index team has been absorbed in everything Hungary-related this week. No surprise there, given Péter Magyar’s seismic election victory on Sunday, and Index’s roots in eastern Europe. Our latest magazine – just launched – explored the effect Orbán’s had in Hungary and on spreading his brand of illiberal democracy. We’re deep in the conjecture stage, awaiting what happens next and asking what an ex-Fidesz conservative who rode to power on an anti-corruption campaign will mean for freedom of expression. Could be good, could be the same old. We’ll be watching closely. Already some positive news there though: Magyar has announced that he will suspend the Orbánised state media and only restore it when objective and impartial reporting can be ensured. It’s a similar move to the one Donald Tusk made when he became Prime Minister of Poland. Magyar also announced that he’d be looking into Viktor Orbán’s influence campaigns. Martin Bright reported on this for the latest magazine, attending a conference in Brussels which was funded by the Hungarian government and intended to bring together far right parties from around Europe. The event was part of a much wider project paid for partly by Russian oil money (filtered through Hungary) which smacked of foreign interference in European democracy. There now needs to be an urgent investigation of the funding of UK-based organisations and politicians by the Orbán government. And when it comes to illiberal forces meddling in overseas affairs, there is way too much of that around. The Guardian rather made the point for me when they broke the story this week of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum censoring its own catalogues to keep in with Beijing. A series of images were removed upon the request of the Chinese printers. One of the images was a historic map of the British Empire, which included China. Presumably its 1930s borders didn’t dovetail with Beijing’s current narrative around Xinjiang and Tibet. This is not the first time the V&A has done an image swap upon the request of Beijing. Nor is the V&A alone, such interference has been happening for a while. The V&A’s justification came down to cost. Apparently using a Chinese printer is half the price of a British or European one. I don’t doubt that. But while I have no idea of the financial margins we’re talking about here, I do know about the broader consequence: An emboldened China, a country that places bounties on the heads of Hong Kong dissidents and harasses lawyers, protesters, activists and journalists alike over here. This is the real cost of doing business on Beijing’s terms. It’s depressing that our cultural institutions – which are meant to be the leading incubators of plural thought after all – are playing ball. The cost also isn’t confined to China; such capitulation emboldens others. So yes it’s great that this week we’ve potentially been rescued from the full-scale Orbánisation of Europe, but he was ultimately just a symptom of a rotten global order, one where speech rights can be bought by the highest bidder – or in the case of the V&A the one offering the cheapest paper. READ MORE

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The Index team has been absorbed in everything Hungary-related this week. No surprise there, given Péter Magyar’s seismic election victory…

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