Belarus is described as Europe’s last dictatorship. The country has had the same president for twenty years and is the only one in Europe still employing capital punishment. The regime has also...

Hungary has received harsh international criticism for being a country where the government draconically restricts freedom of the press. The ruling party usually dismisses these accusations with...

Freedom of speech has always been conditional and all societies have set limits to it. But after the killings in Paris, we were once again reminded of how the conditions of freedom of speech have...

Since Snowden’s revelations PEN has scrutinized mass surveillance laws in several countries the world over. Sarah Clarke, International Policy and Advocacy Officer at PEN International, writes about...

The passing of law 5651 in Turkey has made it possible for the Turkish government to block access to web pages that contain ‘undesirable’ material. This is part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğans...

Society’s use of digital surveillance is here to stay. But we are not wholly powerless in the face of it. If we are prepared to fight for our freedom of expression there are ways to secure our...

In sci-fi literature ‘low tech’ is a way of evading control; simple technology is harder to trace than more advanced. Zeng Jinyan, blogger and human rights activist, writes about how Chinese...

Today China is on the digital forefront. It has the most Internet users in the world and here new technology is being tested. The country, however, also has a sad record when it comes to controlling...

The use of the Internet is growing in Iran—the country has more than forty-six million Internet users and half of the population have access to smart phones. This opens up new channels for publishers...

Biased and centrally controlled news reporting, poor professional knowledge, endemic resignation amongst journalists and misleading directives—this is how author and journalist Abraham T. Zere...

Without investigative journalists, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how a dictatorship abuses the legal system and courts. Here, the well-known Ethiopian journalist Temesgen Desalegn describes such...

The problem is not just that advancements in women’s rights in Ethiopia seem to have come to a standstill—whoever calls to attention these grievances and the betrayal of the female half of the...

From afar, Ethiopia might seem like a success story—from the famine of the 1980s to a country in which the west and China are only too happy to invest. But the real threat to the country comes from...