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Tunisia sentences blogger Hajer Awadi to 26 months over social media post

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Tunisia sentences blogger Hajer Awadi to 26 months over social media post

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New York, October 8, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Tunisian authorities to immediately release blogger Hajer Awadi and overturn her 26-month prison sentence over a social media post concerning a security operation.

On September 30, the misdemeanor chamber of the Tunis Court of First Instance sentenced Awadi to eight months for “praising and glorifying terrorism”, one year for “inciting hatred”, and six months for “making threats”, according to news reports. Her lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, told CPJ that he has appealed the sentence.

“Sentencing Hajer Awadi to more than two years in prison over a social media post is yet another example of Tunisian authorities using the criminal justice system to punish critical expression,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must immediately release Awadi, overturn her conviction, and stop imprisoning journalists and bloggers for their work.”

Awadi, a blogger and political activist who reports on corruption and human rights to around 15,000 followers on Facebook, was arrested at her home in Tunis on January 23 over a Facebook Live video about a recent  security operation in central-west Tunisia. In the video, which has since been removed, she discussed a raid in Majel Bel Abbes where  authorities claim to have killed four suspected terrorists

On January 29, the Judicial Counter-Terrorism Pole ordered Awadi’s detention and transfer to Manouba Women’s Prison, west of Tunis, where she remains detained.

Awadi was previously arrested in April 2020 after posting a Facebook video alleging government corruption, poor distribution of basic food supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, and police mistreatment. She was released eight days later after receiving a 75-day suspended prison sentence, Ben Amor told CPJ.

CPJ emailed the Tunisian presidency for comment but did not receive a response.

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Global Free Speech

Painting of trader Elihu Yale One bright spring day in early April 2026, I visited Leeds Castle in Kent to see its dog collar museum. Of the 130 “rare and valuable collars” in the museum, about 60 had been collected by John Hunt, a historian and antiquarian, and later gifted to the castle by his wife Gertrude in 1977. A further 70 had been acquired by “purchase and donation”. According to the Leeds Castle website, its collection of historic collars, many dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries “was the largest of its kind on public display anywhere in the world”. Perhaps – if the exhibits were actually dog collars. But as an historian of slavery, my suspicion was that at least some of the items that I had seen on the website were not dog collars at all, but rather collars once worn by enslaved Black and Indian people in Britain as a mark of their servitude. Photographs of exhibits at the museum revealed large collars which match depictions of these slave collars in paintings dating to the late 17th and early 18th century, and I was keen to compare the two first-hand. But I was thwarted. Despite the website’s pronouncement that “Leeds Castle’s Dog Collar Museum is open daily,” the museum had been closed. It seems that at some point the curatorial team at Leeds Castle discovered that their exhibits were not all dog collars, and quietly shut the museum. So quietly they forgot to update the castle’s website. There were good intentions behind this, no doubt. But it was also an act of historical censorship, even if inadvertent – part of a pattern of rewriting Britain’s role in the slave trade, a tendency that has become more pronounced over the past few years. Between 1675 and 1807 Britain was the main importer of slaves to the New World from Africa. After 1807, when Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, Britain not only ended its involvement in the international slave trade but actively worked to combat it. Nevertheless, its participation in the slave trade is part of British history. How best to engage with this distasteful part of the story is a complex issue, one that British museums and National Trust sites have a duty to consider carefully. My suspicion was that at least some of the items that I had seen on the website were not dog collars at all As historians undertake deeper research into the topic, the extent of Britain’s investment in slavery, both cultural and material, is becoming evident. Suppressing artefacts, which provide evidence distorts history. Silver slave collars are crucial artefacts which speak to that difficult legacy. The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut owns four portraits of Elihu Yale, dating to between 1710 and 1720. Yale, a wealthy merchant and British colonial administrator, was an early donor to the university now named after him. One of these, painted by the Briton James Worsdale and an imposing 2.3 metres tall, is described as Elihu Yale with his Servant. The portrait, clearly intended to depict Yale as a man of substance, shows him being attended to by a Black slave wearing a silver collar around his neck. Until 2007, it hung in the Yale Corporation Room in the university’s Woodbridge Hall, where the Yale Board of Trustees met to decide campus policy, until a student pointed out the incongruity of the painting on social media: not because it existed, but because of how it existed, benignly watching over meetings of the university’s trustees. John Marciari, a curator for the Yale Center for British Art at the time, acknowledged to the local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, that he knew of many other similar paintings, but that these were normally kept off display. Curators at some museums, he continued, “have since painted over the collars to make the art more palatable.” The paintings of Elihu Yale date to when he was part of the circle of courtiers surrounding Queen Anne. They can be viewed on the Center’s website, along with a discussion of the paintings’ historical provenance and context. Slave collars were a real thing at the time and archival evidence testifies to their ubiquity in England itself. Take, for example, an advertisement in popular newspaper The London Postman, from 17 September 1706: “Runaway from his Master about a fortnight since, a lusty Negro Boy about 18 years of age… Had about his neck a silver collar engraved Captain Thomas Mitchel’s Negro, Living Curators at some museums, he continued in Griffin Street in Shadwell.” An exhibit showing collars at Leeds Castle (Steve Vidler/Alamy) Leeds Castle, to be fair, is an unlikely location for a historical reckoning. On the Easter weekend of my visit to the “dog collar museum”, I was greeted on the path towards the castle by a carved wooden dragon, pretend mermaids and other magical creatures for children to discover. A day at the castle is clearly intended to be a fun day out for children and adults alike. Why force happy families to engage with such disturbing things? But this question underscores an important point: careful thought is a basic prerequisite for the display of such artefacts. For some time, the National Trust (NT) has been engulfed in controversy about the best way to display – or not – such artefacts forming part of the collections in many of its houses. The NT’s collection at Dyrham Park near Bristol, for example, includes a pair of stands that display Black men wearing gold collars holding scallops that serve as side tables. These were given to William Blathwayt in 1700 by his uncle, Thomas Povey. Both had been administrators for empire, with Blathwayt serving six kings and queens over almost 50 years. Leeds Castle, to be fair, is an unlikely location for a historical reckoning The curators at Dyrham Park have approached the issue thoughtfully. In a series of introductory exhibits that visitors encounter before entering the house, they frame Blathwayt’s involvement in empire and in slavery carefully, inviting the observer to acknowledge complicity in a deeply problematic and exploitative system. Then before entering the room with the side tables, visitors find a warning sign providing context for what awaits them. By way of contrast, the same stands also appear on the NT’s website along with the rest of the Dyrham Park collection. The item was once listed as “Nubian Slaves” and “Blackamoor Stands” and is now blandly described as “a pair of giltwood and polychrome stands”; here, there is no discussion of the wider context that the stools are a part of. Dyrham Park stands out for the willingness of its curators to confront this difficult past. Elsewhere, censorship by omission is far more commonplace. Indeed, sometimes this is done in the name of anti-racial history. Some Dutch museums, for instance, seem uncomfortable with any racially descriptive words such as “negro”. In 2015, a painting on the website of the RKD Nederlands Institute for Art History by Herman van der Mijn was entitled Portrait of a Lady with a Negro Servant; now it is just Portrait of an Unknown Woman, with a Servant. Dated about 1720, the Black “servant” was wearing a silver collar, marking him as a slave. Like painting over the silver collars in other works, the renaming of this painting to exclude racial signifiers, which makes it more difficult to be found and to be seen, is again a way of censoring an uncomfortable past. Rather than conceal the existence of these silver collars, museums and other repositories of history have a duty to reckon with the past in meaningful ways. We must see the evidence in order to fully understand the battles fought and costs paid to get rid of such a system. To comprehend how the past continues to shape the present – not only for the descendants of those enslaved in Britain’s empire but for all of us – we cannot and should not censor these historical memories. Museums need to explain to the visitor why it is necessary to engage with such material and why it still disturbs. Perhaps it all comes down to the purpose of museums. Are they supposed to be places that are just a fun day out for families, warming the blood with patriotic ardour? Or can they also be places that help us learn and make us think, that educate us about the past in order for us to make better decisions about the future? Here in the USA, as recently as 30 years ago one could go to Charleston in South Carolina and have little idea that slavery was once pervasive there. The one place that did promise some evidence, the site of the former slave market, was closed to the public. While there and elsewhere across the US, prominent museums have opened to address this history, their interpretations are now directly threatened by the Trump administration. These silver collars and their history, are a part of British history too. Morgan Godwyn, an English minister who had served in Virginia and Barbados wrote in 1682 that “Tho but a few were concerned in this horrid Fact” of slavery in Barbados “yet our whole Nation are guilty”. Perhaps he put it too strongly. But slavery did not just stay safely in the colonies. The NT’s 2020 interim report, Connections between Colonialism and Properties, now in the Care of the National Trust, stating that slavery needs to be more carefully acknowledged at Britain’s historic sites, was exactly right. These silver collars and their history, are a part of British history In response to an email query I sent after my visit, Jo Wiltcher, heritage and engagement director at Leeds Castle, confirmed that the dog collar exhibits were completely closed “following a leak in one of the rooms” in December 2022. When the exhibition was partially reopened, the new display only included a few of the collars. In response to my specific query stating that, “I’ve been working on slave collars for more than a decade (part of a much bigger book) and the online pictures indicated to me that some of the collars might actually have once been used for that purpose,” Wiltcher said: “We are aware of, and are actively working on, [a presentation strategy] behind the scenes.” She further stated that researchers could access the collars by special permission. I suspect that their awareness about the problematic provenance of the collars was sparked by the Guardian’s 2021 coverage of an exhibit at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. As Valika Smeulders, the curator for an exhibit in 2021 put it, with regard to a Dutch silver collar dated 1689: “For the longest time people have not wanted to come to terms with the meaning of those collars … they were always described as being dog collars, but if you look at the paintings, the ones wearing those collars are never the dogs, they are the men.” My best guess is that when Leeds Castle realised what they actually possessed, their solution was to quietly, without fanfare, close the dog collar museum, leaving only a dozen collars behind in two small glass display cases in an otherwise empty room. Ironically, this work of erasure is incomplete. Leeds Castle’s website still has a page dedicated to the dog collar museum, enthusiastically describing its collection of “130 rare and valuable collars … which date from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries”. Affording researchers access is welcome. But it does not fully address the larger issue of setting out the context that led to the existence of these disturbing collars. If Leeds Castle choose not to display them, they should loan them to another museum. Honest curation is certainly possible to do: to frame these artefacts around the complex issues at stake, to show the real bonds and chains, and the structural legal and social system that was racial slavery. Censoring history is not the answer. More generally, the fact that a dog collar museum was open for 50 years with artefacts that were in many cases likely not meant for dogs – that, in fact, likely intended for humans – raises profound questions about how censorship can work as much by omission as by commission. Because of this omission, a difficult history has been hiding all this time in plain sight. READ MORE

Global Free Speech

Matsada2sh, Arabic for “don’t believe it”, was founded in 2018 to check the facts in a country where the official narrative goes largely unchallenged. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has repeatedly told his people to only believe what he says. What started as a fact-checking platform has since expanded into investigative reporting covering Egypt and other Arab countries, digging into everything from discrepancies in official figures to hidden cracks within state institutions. Its Facebook page, the primary channel through which it reached readers inside a country that has reportedly blocked its website, accumulated more than 1.3 million followers. On the nights of 28 and 29 September 2026, Egyptian security forces arrested all six members of its editorial team in a coordinated operation spanning multiple governorates. After days of forced disappearance, they emerged before the public prosecutor, facing charges of being members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and spreading fabricated news in exchange for foreign funding. The detained journalists denied these charges, accusing state security of torturing them, which the Ministry of Interior denied in a statement. It was the first time an entire newsroom team had been arrested in Egypt. “Even when state forces stormed Mada Masr several years back, they only detained several journalists at the time, and these were quickly released,” Mohamed Lotfy, co-founder and executive director of Egyptian Centre for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), a homegrown organisation defending rights in Egypt, told Index on Censorship. “This is an alarming precedent.” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has repeatedly told his people to only believe what he says The arrests brought the number of journalists behind bars in Egypt to at least 26, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights — all facing security and political charges, including belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood and spreading false news. What Matsada2sh actually did “Did the state want journalism from abroad? We chose to do journalism from Egypt. Why are we paying the price?” With these lines, a post published on Matsada2sh’s Facebook page on 3 October began defending its editorial team against the Ministry of Interior’s accusations – accusations replayed across countless talk shows and headlines run by state-aligned media. What distinguished Matsada2sh was its method. “It used open-source tools to overcome the limited access to information in the country, investigate and report stories other media platforms haven’t covered, and challenge the official narrative on many issues,” said Mina Thabet, head of the Middle East and North Africa at PEN International. Over the years, Matsada2sh dug into official narratives, challenging officials’ statements inflating immigrants’ numbers as another justification for economic hardships; exposing otherwise overlooked decline in spending on the education system; breaking down legal and economic expressions for a general audience. It also revealed concealed disagreements within institutions long considered opaque. “Recent reports about discontent among judges and public prosecutors over new hirings revealed the scale of favouritism and patronage, but also brought before the public disagreements within the judiciary that are meant to remain hidden,” said Lotfy. “Matsada2sh relied in its reports on official and verified sources, precisely the kind of fact-based journalism that made it dangerous to the system. Its reporting revealed information about those in power and undermined the trust of citizens in official narratives, which the authorities characterised as destabilising public security.” “We chose to do journalism from Egypt. Why are we paying the price?” In 2023, the platform published reporting on the identities of Egyptian nationals, including security officials, on board a private plane seized in Zambia carrying cash and weapons. A journalist was arrested within hours and later released. Matsada2sh invoked the incident directly: “If we are Brotherhood [members] and funded [from abroad], why did [the] security apparatus clear us in 2023?” The exact trigger for the September 2026 arrests remains unclear. Co-founder Abdelrahman Mansour, who lives abroad and has denied all accusations of ties to the Brotherhood, had played a pivotal role in the 2011 uprising through a Facebook page he co-founded, which helped mobilise mass protests that ultimately toppled President Hosni Mubarak and threatened the military’s grip on the country. Since seizing power in 2014 following a coup against Mohamed Morsi – the country’s only freely elected president and a senior Brotherhood figure – El-Sisi has taken systematic measures to prevent any recurrence. A media landscape hollowed out from within Egypt’s media consolidation happened through both censorship and ownership. In 2017, the General Intelligence Service established Eagle Capital, which acquired controlling shares in the Egyptian Media Group, a nominally private conglomerate that now controls major television channels and newspapers. The State Media Monitor identifies three structures through which the government has consolidated control of the media sector: the constitutional bodies of the National Media Authority and the National Press Authority, as well as the Egyptian Media Group. Three media laws passed in 2018 – Laws 178, 179, and 180 – together with a cybercrime law the same year, gave the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR) sweeping powers to block websites, revoke licences, and refer journalists to prosecutors. By the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, Egypt ranked 170th out of 180 countries. “Since President El-Sisi seized power in 2014, spaces for independent and free media have shrunk significantly,” said Thabet. “These practices and policies have created a fragile press and a new breed of journalism that does what the security apparatus tells it and never questions the authorities’ narrative – with many even turning to propaganda platforms for the regime.” This left Matsada2sh, “along with a handful of other online platforms – which continue to operate without mandated licence from the SCMR –  the only independent, professional and serious journalism in a country with a dying media landscape,” said Lotfy. “With little to no challenge to official narratives, policies, and decisions,” Thabet said. “The regime lost its tolerance for criticism and, within a few years, grew sensitive and insecure about even the simplest questions.” Noting that the exact reason for the attack on the platform is unclear, he added that “it is clearly part of El-Sisi’s crackdown on press freedom and a manifestation of his zero-tolerance policy toward criticism.” In its 3 October post, which garnered nearly 30,000 reactions, Matsada2sh wrote: “We belong to neither side. We didn’t want a press that parroted a ready-made narrative simply because it originated domestically, nor did we want a press that acted according to a political discourse imposed from abroad. It was a difficult gamble. We chose ourselves. We chose Egypt, and the press we dream of. A press that is impartial and unbiased, where ideology doesn’t trump professionalism, where agendas aren’t imposed on truth, and where there is no place for political affiliations.” *Journalist used a pseudonym for security concerns. READ MORE

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