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Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution. He is also the co-host of the Free Speech Unmuted podcast. Read the full article here

Media & Culture

Review: A Novel Capturing the Cruelty of Mass Incarceration

Suzanna’s fictional mother in The Hill—much like author Harriet Clark’s real-life mother—is imprisoned for a botched leftist bank robbery. Suzanna’s childhood is a dreamy Groundhog Day loop of visits, guards, waiting rooms, fluorescent lights, and adult evasiveness. She visits her mom every week, first with the simple commitment of a child and later with more complicated feelings. Querulous nostalgia for communism and a mute acceptance of violent leftism structure the lives of three generations of women in the story. But if there is a political lesson of The Hill, it can be found somewhere in the foggy way it captures and condemns the cruel…

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Reporting in Somalia is becoming a much more dangerous proposition. Photo: UNSomalia/Ilyas Ahmed “Do you know that we can kill you? To us, your life is worth less than a cigarette.” These are the words with which operatives from Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) threatened freelance journalist Mohamed Bulbul, days after he co-authored a news report for UK news outlet The Guardian about the prosecution of activist Sadia Moalim Ali. Two days after the article ran in June 2026, Bulbul was having dinner with two fellow journalists at a restaurant in Mogadishu’s Zoobe area when armed men wearing black masks entered the establishment. “They walked straight towards our table [shouting] ‘Stand up! Stand up!’” Bulbul told Index. The masked men beat all three journalists before they dragged him outside, placed a bag over his head and forced him into a vehicle.  After being moved between two police stations and the offices of the regional police commissioner, Bulbul was interrogated by NISA officers about the article. “They asked me why I had published it.” He was then, he said, given three choices: “Work with us and take money, leave the country, or if you refuse both, we will kill you.” Bulbul fled Somalia and is now in an undisclosed safe location. “Saving my own life become my priority,” he said. “I can no longer spend time with my parents or my children.” Bulbul’s experience is not unique. Across Somalia, journalists and press freedom advocates say that intelligence and security agencies are intimidating, detaining and otherwise silencing reporters. Recent cases in Mogadishu and Puntland state indicate the state’s growing reliance on intelligence agencies and extra-legal actions, rather than the police and the courts, to deal with critical journalism. On 2 July, journalist Suways Jama Mohamed was arrested outside her home in Garowe, Puntland. Suways, founder of Suways Media, a Facebook-based news platform covering social issues, was detained after the platform published a 15-second video showing armed militia operating in her neighbourhood. She was held in Puntland’s Garowe Central Prison for 13 days before being released on bail on 15 July. Mohamed has been charged with spreading false information, defamation, insulting public officials and disturbing public order. If convicted, she could face up to three years in prison. Qareen Abdiweli, Suways’ lawyer, has challenged both the legal basis of the charges and the court’s jurisdiction. “A journalist cannot be prosecuted under the Penal Code for acts related to the exercise of their profession,” Abdiweli told RSF. Suways’ defence team have filed a motion asking for the case be referred to the Puntland Media Council, the media regulatory body. The case is pending. Less than two weeks after Suways’ arrest, Mohamed Jama Mohamad, an independent journalist who had previously worked for private television channel SBC TV, was also detained in Puntland state. Mohamed had been reporting on business closures in the city of Bosaso, following an increase in port taxes. Mohamed was taking photographs of the closed market when he noticed several men following him. “They looked suspicious and kept talking on their phones while following me everywhere I went.” Moments later, a vehicle pulled to a halt beside him. “[The people in the vehicle] weren’t police officers,” Mohamed told Source. “Their uniform [sic] looked more like military uniforms.”  Mohamed was forced into the vehicle without explanation, blindfolded and then taken to a detention facility run by the Puntland Intelligence Service (PISA). Mohamed said that he was held for four days without seeing a lawyer or being arraigned before a court.  “I had simply been taken from the marketplace. No warrant. No judge. No lawyer.” According to the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), these arrests are indicative of the government’s wish to suppress free expression. In June, SJS reported the abduction by NISA agents of journalist Mascuud Warsame, founder of Xogbile TV, in Mogadishu. Warsame was released, without charge, after 39 days in detention. For media organisations, these incidents are becoming increasingly familiar. “Compared with previous years, the overall pattern of violations remains consistent,” Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, Secretary General of the Somali Journalists Syndicate, told Index. “But this year has seen a sharp increase in arbitrary arrests [and] politically motivated detentions, particularly during the ongoing political and constitutional crisis in Somalia.” Somalia’s federal government is currently advancing amendments to the country’s constitution despite objections from two federal states. This may have implications for the balance of power between the federal states, and critics fear that it will allow incumbent president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to extend his current term of office. Mumin said that while journalists in Somalia have long been obliged to deal with intimidation and violence, the first seven months of 2026 have seen a spike in the use of prolonged detention without charge, alongside more overt interventions by Somalia’s intelligence agencies. Security analyst Samira Gaid told Index that Somalia’s security institutions are increasingly being used as a tool to suppress journalism, activists and anyone courageous enough to challenge the government.  “The role of the media is to hold those in public office accountable,” she said.  “Yet journalists are being targeted simply because they reported information that the government did not want the public to know.” International partners, according to Gaid, invested heavily in building Somalia’s security institutions – a key priority following the end of the country’s destructive civil war. “Those institutions are now being used in ways that go beyond the law.”  Gaid said, noting that NISA was created to protect national security rather than investigate journalists or detain civilians engaged in legitimate reporting. The journalists interviewed for this article all described strikingly similar experiences – arrests without warrants, detention by intelligence agencies, questioning over their reporting. For Somalia’s independent media, the message is becoming increasingly clear; reporting on anything deemed sensitive by the authorities may carry consequences extending far beyond the newsroom. READ MORE

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The University of Cambridge. Photo: llee_wu / ICC BY-ND 2.0 Last month Index ran a story about a filmmaker and activist from Pakistan. His name was Roshaan Khattak and he was exploring human rights violations in Balochistan. Cambridge University had accepted him on a research pathway, with the understanding that completing this successfully would lead to him being accepted on the PhD programme. But then Khattak received a death threat and there was an unidentified explosion outside his college which scared him. He expected Cambridge to protect him but instead, as Khattak told Index, he was first locked out of his college then, despite achieving a distinction for his work, was told that he could not progress to doing a PhD and his enrolment was terminated. He saw this, and his supervisors agreed with him, as the university caving in to transnational repression. There has been little national newspaper coverage of his case. On the contrary, there was excessive and sometimes unjustifiable coverage of the allegations of plagiarism made against Professor Jason Arday. He was once hailed by Cambridge as their newest Black recruit and at 37, the youngest professor at the university. As Stephen Bush in the FT observes the question of race then became the focus of the media’s coverage, rather than Arday’s academic integrity. As the university came under increasing pressure, it announced an investigation into Arday. Since Arday’s death, there have been calls to impose curbs on the media. As you might expect, Index strongly opposes any regulation as an impingement of the right – indeed the duty – of the press to report on matters of genuine public interest. What purpose would regulation have served here? It might have shut down legitimate questions about Cambridge and its reputation for academic excellence; about the appointment of academics at the university; and about plagiarism, itself a growing issue across academia. Indeed, public focus on the role of the media in the events of the last few weeks has allowed Cambridge, arguably a more powerful institution than the press today, to evade scrutiny of its role in elevating Arday. Cambridge is supposed to be a world leader in research and teaching, yet when Arday was appointed three years ago, according to the BBC, there were only five other Black professors at Cambridge out of a total of more than 970. The numbers nationally are appalling too: 270 Black university professors in the whole of the country. There are so few Black professors today in British academia that they fear that they too will become the targets of impossible levels of public scrutiny – into their research, into their lives, into their very right to occupy a place in the public sphere on the basis of what they do for a living: in short that their freedom of expression will be curtailed. Also, research at Cambridge seems to be concentrated around subjects that are politically and financially advantageous to the institution – as opposed to research that has clear merit, but is less relevant with respect to commercial interests and priorities. Research income from China topped £23 million in 2024/25. The Judge Business School has formed a partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry. I started with Khattak, a scholar from Pakistan whom Cambridge first welcomed and then cast aside. I end with the tragedy of Arday, who became the focus of arguments that extended far beyond the question of the rigour of his academic practice. The link between the two is that Cambridge adopted both as instruments that served its own purposes; then abandoned them when that purpose no longer suited them. Both cases have implications, direct and indirect, for the right to free expression in universities. READ MORE

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