“He blocked the sun.” This is what Uladzimir Njakljajeu said in 2012 when the then Swedish Ambassador Stefan Eriksson was forced to leave Belarus. The one blocked was of course the President. Yes, the...
Introducing a well-known author to a new audience is not easy. Let us therefore get it over and done with. Alherd Bakharevich is one of the best authors in Belarus. Despite the fact that he does not...
What difference does it make in what way we label minority groups? When language is perpetually in flux how do we know which words or expressions we should use? In her research Anna Vogel studies how...
Swaziland or the Kingdom of Eswatini as it is formally called is an absolute monarchy freed from British colonial rule in 1968. In Swaziland, to be homosexual and to be open with your identity as an...
“Are we witnessing the death of journalism or the end of the courage to speak the truth?” The appraised writer, human rights activist, and journalist Lydia Cacho writes about a brutal climate in...
Each year journalists worldwide who ask unwanted questions, who investigate those in power, and who simply are doing their job are persecuted and killed. But even in this dangerous profession there...
“..I’ve lived in India for over forty years, and the last ten have been a steady, brutal immersion into an ocean of hate, so constant and so all-pervasive that we no longer notice it as ‘hate speech.’...
Has the historically weighty Rwanda Hate Speech Genocide Law, intended to thwart hate speech in Rwanda, transformed into a tool now used against dissidents in the country? The Human Rights lawyer...
“I explained as thoroughly as I could that one of the words was the name of my lands, the other of my hometown, and that Newroz is a festivity that Kurds have celebrated for thousands of years. At...
In April and May this year in Kabul more people have died from the ongoing conflicts and violence than from COVID-19. R Musawi describes how the pandemic, fear, death, corruption, and explosions...
In Turkey during the pandemic hundreds of students have been forced to move back home to their families, entailing a risk for those who have other values than their parents or are otherwise exposed in...
"I was arrested on March 26, 2011. That is when I was introduced to the secrets of the dark. Three black cars stopped outside my home in Damascus; eight persons, armed with automatic guns, stepped out...
Self-censorship creeps up on and moves into the spines of journalists who work for free expression. When the threat is indirect – Slovenia’s journalists and writers can be published without risking...
“..I remember an early test report where a psychologist said: ‘Brian would rather be given a hiding than be ignored." Duuh! Wouldn’t everyone? Long before words like social distancing and self...
For Ethiopia the virus has been a genie let out of the bottle that has exacerbated an existent political crisis. Since 2014 enormous sacrifices in the forms of deadly riots and protests have been made...
