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Saturday, June 27
Global Free Speech

People attend the funeral of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in Baissariyeh, Lebanon, April 23, 2026. Photo: AAli Hashisho/Xinhua/Alamy This Sunday is World Press Freedom Day. Like International Women’s Day, every day should really be World Press Freedom Day. Journalists are powerful watchdogs and protecting them should be a baseline requirement for a free society. But given how woeful the state of media freedom is right now – the number of murdered journalists being at a record high – a day of focus is clearly much needed. So too is a monument. The UK will have its first one dedicated to journalists killed in conflict zones next year, the design of which has just been revealed. Former Index trustee Sarah Sands spoke to us about it. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), run by Jodie Ginsberg who used to to work at Index, is calling for an independent global body to support investigations into attacks on the media. Veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb echoed these calls, speaking days after Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike. That there are many people working hard to address the dire situation is welcome. At Index these threats impact us on several levels. They feed into our campaigning programmes, while the editorial team work with people very much at the coal face. I joined the organisation in 2017 and one of the first articles I edited featured an interview with a Mexican journalist called Javier Valdez. A few months later Valdez was dead, shot 12 times by an unidentified gunman in broad daylight. That same year, and for several years after, I was in regular email correspondence with Andrei Aleksandrau, a former Index colleague and journalist from Belarus. In 2021 he was arrested in Minsk. A year later, another one of our contributors, Larysa Shchyrakova, was arrested. Fortunately Shchyrakova is out of jail and you can read about her experiences here. Aleksandrau is still being held. We also published Victoria Roschyna from Ukraine who was killed in 2024. I could list many similar examples, suffice to say the Index archive is a treasure trove, but it’s also a space where the words of the murdered and the wrongfully detained stand still, ossified, a sad and damning testament to the perils of simply observing. As I said, World Press Freedom Day should be every day and we work on media freedom issues 24/7. Still, we have commissioned a trilogy of pieces this week with the date in mind: Oren Persico writes from Israel on the media ecosystem there; Nedim Turfent, a former political prisoner in Turkey, talks about the threats directed at exiled media in Europe; and Dahlia Kholaif speaks to people on the ground in the Gulf about how the Iran war has amplified the ugly authoritarian reality of these states. Are journalists the canary in the coalmine, the first to be attacked during a democratic backslide? Perhaps, though I’ve heard artists and minority groups claim the same. What’s true is that journalists are the much needed fourth estate. They are a vital check on governments and the powerful. Journalists risk their lives to inform ordinary citizens about what is happening – and they’re now under unprecedented attack around the world. That fact should shame us all. READ MORE

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People attend the funeral of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in Baissariyeh, Lebanon, April 23, 2026. Photo: AAli Hashisho/Xinhua/Alamy This Sunday is World Press Freedom Day. Like International Women’s Day, every day should really be World Press Freedom Day. Journalists are powerful watchdogs and protecting them should be a baseline requirement for a free society. But given how woeful the state of media freedom is right now – the number of murdered journalists being at a record high – a day of focus is clearly much needed. So too is a monument. The UK will have its first one dedicated to journalists killed in conflict zones next year, the design of which has just been revealed. Former Index trustee Sarah Sands spoke to us about it. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), run by Jodie Ginsberg who used to to work at Index, is calling for an independent global body to support investigations into attacks on the media. Veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb echoed these calls, speaking days after Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike. That there are many people working hard to address the dire situation is welcome. At Index these threats impact us on several levels. They feed into our campaigning programmes, while the editorial team work with people very much at the coal face. I joined the organisation in 2017 and one of the first articles I edited featured an interview with a Mexican journalist called Javier Valdez. A few months later Valdez was dead, shot 12 times by an unidentified gunman in broad daylight. That same year, and for several years after, I was in regular email correspondence with Andrei Aleksandrau, a former Index colleague and journalist from Belarus. In 2021 he was arrested in Minsk. A year later, another one of our contributors, Larysa Shchyrakova, was arrested. Fortunately Shchyrakova is out of jail and you can read about her experiences here. Aleksandrau is still being held. We also published Victoria Roschyna from Ukraine who was killed in 2024. I could list many similar examples, suffice to say the Index archive is a treasure trove, but it’s also a space where the words of the murdered and the wrongfully detained stand still, ossified, a sad and damning testament to the perils of simply observing. As I said, World Press Freedom Day should be every day and we work on media freedom issues 24/7. Still, we have commissioned a trilogy of pieces this week with the date in mind: Oren Persico writes from Israel on the media ecosystem there; Nedim Turfent, a former political prisoner in Turkey, talks about the threats directed at exiled media in Europe; and Dahlia Kholaif speaks to people on the ground in the Gulf about how the Iran war has amplified the ugly authoritarian reality of these states. Are journalists the canary in the coalmine, the first to be attacked during a democratic backslide? Perhaps, though I’ve heard artists and minority groups claim the same. What’s true is that journalists are the much needed fourth estate. They are a vital check on governments and the powerful. Journalists risk their lives to inform ordinary citizens about what is happening – and they’re now under unprecedented attack around the world. That fact should shame us all. READ MORE

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This Sunday is World Press Freedom Day. Like International Women’s Day, every day should really be World Press Freedom Day. Journalists are powerful watchdogs and protecting them should be a baseline requirement for a free society. But given how woeful the state of media freedom is right now – the number of murdered journalists being at a record high – a day of focus is clearly much needed. So too is a monument. The UK will have its first one dedicated to journalists killed in conflict zones next year, the design of which has just been revealed. Former Index trustee Sarah Sands spoke to us about it. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), run by Jodie Ginsberg who used to to work at Index, is calling for an independent global body to support investigations into attacks on the media. Veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb echoed these calls, speaking days after Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

That there are many people working hard to address the dire situation is welcome.

At Index these threats impact us on several levels. They feed into our campaigning programmes, while the editorial team work with people very much at the coal face. I joined the organisation in 2017 and one of the first articles I edited featured an interview with a Mexican journalist called Javier Valdez. A few months later Valdez was dead, shot 12 times by an unidentified gunman in broad daylight. That same year, and for several years after, I was in regular email correspondence with Andrei Aleksandrau, a former Index colleague and journalist from Belarus. In 2021 he was arrested in Minsk. A year later, another one of our contributors, Larysa Shchyrakova, was arrested. Fortunately Shchyrakova is out of jail and you can read about her experiences here. Aleksandrau is still being held. We also published Victoria Roschyna from Ukraine who was killed in 2024. I could list many similar examples, suffice to say the Index archive is a treasure trove, but it’s also a space where the words of the murdered and the wrongfully detained stand still, ossified, a sad and damning testament to the perils of simply observing.

As I said, World Press Freedom Day should be every day and we work on media freedom issues 24/7. Still, we have commissioned a trilogy of pieces this week with the date in mind: Oren Persico writes from Israel on the media ecosystem there; Nedim Turfent, a former political prisoner in Turkey, talks about the threats directed at exiled media in Europe; and Dahlia Kholaif speaks to people on the ground in the Gulf about how the Iran war has amplified the ugly authoritarian reality of these states.

Are journalists the canary in the coalmine, the first to be attacked during a democratic backslide? Perhaps, though I’ve heard artists and minority groups claim the same. What’s true is that journalists are the much needed fourth estate. They are a vital check on governments and the powerful.

Journalists risk their lives to inform ordinary citizens about what is happening – and they’re now under unprecedented attack around the world. That fact should shame us all.

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Global Free Speech

Photo by: Stephen Barnes/Medical/Alamy UK news this week is dominated by a damning report led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden that reveals how more than 500 mothers and babies were harmed or died at maternity units in Nottingham. This isn’t the first scandal Ockenden has investigated. A few years back terrible failings were revealed in Shropshire hospitals run by the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust where 201 babies and nine mothers died.  We spoke to Ockenden for the magazine and she repeated this: “women aren’t listened to”. Another common thread was cover-up. Secrecy is not a one-off, it’s a pattern, wrote Martin Bright when he reported on the Shropshire scandal for Index. As Bright said, “this is not a historical story; it is an ongoing crisis”. Maternity scandals happen not only in Britain but all over the world. Last year’s protests in Morocco were ignited after eight women died in a maternity ward in Agadir because of severe medical neglect. In Egypt last week Omnia Sweidan, a former resident physician in obstetrics and gynaecology at Alexandria’s El-Shatby University Hospital, wrote a Facebook post detailing a series of abusive incidents faced by women at Alexandria’s Al-Shatby Hospital. It was read and shared by tens of thousands. Within 24 hours of posting, instead of the government declaring an investigation, security forces arrested Sweidan. While she was apparently later released, she’s been accused of spreading false news and misusing social media. She could end up in jail. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world – the figures of deaths and injuries are rising, but to what no one really knows. The Taliban won’t publish the data, probably to cover-up the true numbers. I’ve navigated maternity services myself in the UK. I’ve generally had good experiences and I’m very grateful to the NHS. But my experiences have not been uncomplicated – my daughter very nearly died. What saved her, I’ve been told, were a few factors – my race (white), my class (middle), where I live (London) and the fact that I relentlessly badgered those at my local hospital for weeks on end saying things didn’t feel right. Let me be clear here though: one shouldn’t have to be a dogged white Londoner to get good medical care. And a recent health committee report revealed terrible inequalities faced by people who are members of ethnic minorities, stating that “[B]abies that are Black or Black British Asian or Asian British have a more than 50% higher risk of perinatal mortality”. At Index we typically work on stories where dissidents take on the powerful: leaders, oligarchs and tech bros. The victims of maternity care scandals might not appear the same. But there is much that unites them. At the end of the day if the response you get from a doctor or nurse to a basic medical request is a shrug or a sneer, your free speech is being violated. If the systems view calls for accountability as dissent that must be silenced, then they are censoring. We grew up being told we’re lucky, that childbirth was one of the leading causes of death before the advent of modern medicine. For many of us that’s true. Just not all of us. That’s a travesty demanding urgent attention – in Nottingham and beyond. READ MORE

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