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...

No one who has not been wrongly imprisoned can really understand how the system, bit by bit, erodes one’s dignity and self-respect. Prizewinning Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu was sent down for...

Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye and photographer Johan Persson were held for one and a half years in Kality prison. Martin is very familiar with the environment described in many of the texts in...

Being a journalist in Eritrea means risking your life every day. Here, the pseudonym Mussie Hadgu writes about what made him become a journalist. “The crimes I witnessed shook me to the core, and I...

In 2001, mass protests broke out in Eritrea after a number of top officials and members of President Isaias Afewerki’s party publicly criticised his autocratic rule and failure to implement democratic...

Eritrea has long languished at the bottom of Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. Despite this, many journalists risk their lives to report on what is happening in the country. One of...