How the world restricts speech

Two Toronto Police officers attended a woman's home in Feb 2026 after she posted a photo with a crude caption about Prime Minister Mark Carney on Instagram. Video of the doorstep exchange, in which officers caution her that continued online threats could lead to arrest and she replies that they cannot stop her speech, circulated widely the following month. What lifts this above an anecdote is that the Toronto Police Service confirmed the visit in writing and explained the standard: where officers see an online post that is concerning but may not reach the criminal threshold, they may caution the person about their behaviour and the consequences of continuing. A litigation lawyer interviewed about it described such visits as low-priority warnings about content that is derogatory or vaguely threatening. Read plainly, that is a police service stating on the record that it sends officers to homes over speech it accepts may not be criminal, and treating the visit itself as the remedy. The force characterises it as a threat caution prompted by one specific post; she characterises it as being warned off an opinion about the head of government. Both framings are recorded here because the disagreement is the substance -- if the post was criminal there was a charge available, and if it was not, the knock is the only sanction that occurred.

Two Toronto police officers visited resident Nicole Miske's home after she posted an expletive-laden Instagram caption about Prime Minister Mark Carney on February 10, 2026, telling him he 'will get' his over a claim about Israeli overflight of Canadian airspace. Her video of the encounter went viral. The Toronto Police Service confirmed the visit was prompted by that single post and was intended as a warning even though, by its own account, the post may not have met the threshold for criminal charges; the officers cautioned that continued posts could lead to arrest while she insisted on her right to free expression. Lawyers described such visits as low-priority warnings -- police contact at the door over political speech that the service itself did not consider chargeable.

EXILE OFFERED AS THE ALTERNATIVE TO PRISON. Austin Llerandi, who publishes the community newsletter Amanecer Habanero, was held for five hours at a Havana police station on Aug 21, 2026 and told by a State Security officer to leave Cuba within two months or be jailed under Decree-Law 370, which penalises unauthorised publishing, and for 'crimes against State Security'. It was his second such threat in a month, after an interrogation on Jul 14. The deadline runs out around Oct 21. Not established: whether any case has been opened, or what he will do.

Maykel Castillo Perez, known as Osorbo, is a Cuban rapper and co-author of the protest anthem Patria y Vida and a leader of the San Isidro Movement of dissident artists. After neighbors had once blocked police from detaining him, state security agents arrested him at his home in Havana in May 2021, and in June 2022 a court sentenced him to nine years on charges including contempt, public disorder, assault, and defamation of state institutions. He won two Latin Grammys for the song while imprisoned. Cuban authorities framed the case as ordinary public-order and assault crimes; Amnesty International, which calls him a prisoner of conscience, the UN, and the Inter-American Commission say he was punished for his music and pro-democracy expression.

El Salvador fell eight places in the 2026 RSF Index, to 143rd, on the strength of its 2025 foreign-agents law -- legislation that intensified pressure on the press and forced many journalists into exile. It is the clearest case of the year's dominant mechanism: not arrests but registration and funding statutes that make independent journalism administratively impossible. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 158 libel lawsuits filed against journalists in Mexico between 2020 and 2025 -- a rate that makes civil litigation, not prosecution, the primary legal pressure on Mexican reporting. Community newspaper editors working on tight budgets are the most exposed, because the cost of defending a suit is the punishment regardless of how it ends, and a single filing can absorb a small outlet's annual margin. This record stands in for a documented pattern rather than one event; it is here so the map does not imply Mexico is quiet, and it should be broken into individual cases as they are verified. Note what it implies about every other country on this map: where libel is cheap to file and slow to resolve, the visible arrest count understates the pressure on the press by a wide margin, and this map counts arrests far better than it counts lawsuits.

During 2025 protests in Bocas del Toro, Panamanian authorities cut internet and mobile telephone access, drawing demands from digital-rights groups for immediate restoration of service.

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered internet providers to block X in August 2024 after the company refused to appoint a local legal representative, with VPN users threatened with daily fines. The ban lasted until early October, when X paid fines and complied.

On August 30, 2024 Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered every Brazilian ISP to block X nationwide after Elon Musk refused court orders to deactivate accounts tied to supporters of the January 8 Brasilia attacks and, after Moraes threatened to arrest the company's local representative, X closed its Brazil office rather than name a new one. The block cut off a market of tens of millions. Moraes also froze Starlink's assets to collect X's fines and imposed daily fines on individual users who reached the platform through VPNs -- punishing readers, not just the platform. When a network update briefly routed X around the block via third-party clouds, he added another 5-million-real daily fine for 'willful, illegal and persistent' circumvention. X capitulated in October: it named a representative, deleted the ordered accounts, and paid roughly 5.2 million dollars, and the court restored service on October 8. Supporters called it the rule of law binding a global platform; critics called it a single judge silencing an entire country's primary political forum for five weeks -- both readings are why the case became the global reference point it is.

Between 2016 and early 2018, Chile's then-director of Army intelligence, Schafik Nazal Lazaro, asked for the phone communications of journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona, of Army whistleblowers who had talked to him, and of their contacts. A former appellate judge, Juan Antonio Poblete Mendez, signed the orders that made it legal on paper, describing the targets as Bolivian agents. They were not. Weibel had been reporting on corruption inside the Army. On July 2, 2026 the Seventh Court of Guarantee of Santiago convicted both men of unlawful interception of communications and falsifying official records, sentencing each to five years; because both admitted the facts and accepted the evidence, the case was resolved without a full oral trial. Columbia's Global Freedom of Expression project records it as the first time any court has convicted both a judge and a military officer for spying on a journalist. Almost every record on these maps is surveillance or censorship arriving without consequence. This is the rarer thing: the paperwork that authorised the spying became the evidence that convicted the people who signed it.

Five Colombian journalists linked to Yo Te Creo Colega, an initiative set up by journalists to collect and document accounts of sexual and workplace harassment in the news industry, received death threats, misogynistic abuse and intimidation after publishing accounts from people alleging abuse by a prominent Colombian journalist. RSF reported this on 14 August 2026 and called on the authorities to protect the five and to open an investigation. Allegations across the Colombian media industry have accumulated since March 2026 in what has been described as a MeToo moment for Colombian journalism. The five are not named in the material read for this entry. Marker at Bogota; individual locations are not given. Whether any investigation has been opened is not established.

Abelardo de la Espriella was elected president of Colombia in June 2026. RSF said on 26 June 2026 that his record of bringing legal actions against journalists raises concern for press freedom, alongside Colombia's persistent violence against reporters. RSF also documents verbal attacks of a sexist character aimed at discrediting women journalists including Laura Rodriguez of the digital programme Piso 8, Maria Lucia Fernandez of Noticias Caracol and Camila Zuluaga of Blu Radio. On 1 June 2026 a Bogota court ordered de la Espriella to retract and publicly apologise for remarks of a sexual nature he made about Rodriguez in an interview -- a court finding against him, recorded here as the counterweight to the concern. Whether the retraction and apology were made is not established, and no response from de la Espriella is recorded in the source read for this entry. This is a forward-looking press-freedom concern, not a record of acts in office.

Cristian Hernando Herrera Narino, a Colombian journalist who was under state protection, was shot dead on Saturday 6 June 2026 in Cucuta, on the border with Venezuela. RSF condemned the killing and called for stronger protective measures. That a journalist already inside the National Protection Unit's scheme was killed goes to whether the scheme works, not only to whether it exists. No arrest or motive is established in the source read for this entry. To ask: whether the Attorney General's Office has opened a case and whether it is being treated as related to his work.

After the disputed July 28, 2024 presidential election, Venezuelan authorities launched what they call Operation Knock Knock (Operacion Tun Tun), using social media and a government reporting app to identify and detain people who protested or questioned the official result online. The government, including Nicolas Maduro and Attorney General Tarek Saab, said those held were responsible for violence, terrorism, and incitement. Human Rights Watch, the UN, the Carter Center, and the US State Department found that many of the more than 2,000 people detained were held for peaceful protest or for merely criticizing the government, often charged with vaguely defined incitement to hatred or terrorism carrying terms up to 30 years. In one documented case, opposition organizer Maria Oropeza livestreamed security forces breaking into her home in early August 2024 before she was taken away.

After a disputed July 2024 election, Venezuela's government ordered access to X suspended for ten days as security forces put down protests; the block remained in place well beyond the stated period.

Albania recorded an internet shutdown in 2025, a rare such event for a European state, in the #KeepItOn coalition's annual tracking.

FREED, AND PUT ON A BUS OUT OF THE COUNTRY THE SAME DAY. After US Special Envoy John Coale visited Minsk on Mar 19, 2026, Belarus announced the release of 250 political prisoners. FIFTEEN WERE DEPORTED TO LITHUANIA THAT DAY, among them journalist Katsiaryna Bakhvalava (Andreyeva) and blogger Eduard Palchys; the rest of those released stayed in Belarus. BAJ chairperson Andrei Bastunets said the deported were expelled on unclear legal grounds, without documents or explanation. THE PATTERN PREDATES THE MARCH RELEASE. Larysa Shchyrakova was deported rather than sent home: she was among 10 journalists and 42 other political prisoners taken to Lithuania on 11 Sep 2025 in the US-brokered release, four months before her term was due to end on 13 Jan 2026 (earlier reporting gave 13 Jan 2026 as a release date; it was the scheduled end of her sentence). Arrested in December 2022 and sentenced in August 2023 to three and a half years, she has said she has nowhere to stay, was not allowed to say goodbye to her mother when she died, and cannot visit the grave. Iryna Slaunikava, who had served two years and eight months with four months left, told Reuters she wants to go home and cannot imagine her life without Belarus. Some of those freed publicly asked to return and be reunited with their families. BAJ published a report on Jul 28, 2026 examining the practice and its legality under national and international law, and describes ENFORCED EXILE AS A METHOD OF ELIMINATING INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM FROM INSIDE THE COUNTRY rather than as clemency. THIS ALSO EXPLAINS A NUMBER THAT LOOKS LIKE A DISPUTE AND IS NOT. Counts of imprisoned Belarusian media workers fall through 2026: BAJ recorded 28 at the start of the year, CPJ at least 23 in April, and the IFJ and EFJ citing BAJ put it at 21 in August. That is not a definitional disagreement between trackers -- IT IS THE SAME FIGURE DECLINING, and it declines partly because people are being released into expulsion. A falling prisoner count is being produced by emptying the country of journalists, not by ending the prosecutions. THE PROSECUTIONS CONTINUE: on Feb 26, 2026 a Brest court convicted Uladzimir Yanukevich, 66, and Andrei Pakalenka, 44, former managers of the BAR24 news portal, of TREASON, sentencing them to 14 and 12 years after a closed-door trial. Six journalists were convicted within a single week. BAJ itself was designated extremist in 2023. THE PATTERN CONTINUED IN SEPTEMBER. On Sep 16, 2026, after US envoy John Coale met Lukashenko, Belarus freed 25 prisoners; three were journalists -- Andrei Aliaksandrau, serving 14 years, Dzmitry Navazhylau (6) and Kiryl Pazniak (3.5) -- and BAJ says all three were deported to Lithuania. CPJ now counts 18 journalists still jailed, down from BAJ's 28 at the start of the year: the same falling figure this record explains. BAJ's report names 14 journalists and two bloggers expelled across four 2025 operations (Feb 12, Jun 21, Sep 11, Dec 13) and two more media workers in March 2026. It concludes the practice amounts to deportation and persecution -- crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute -- and notes that Belarusian law does not allow a citizen to be expelled at all. One man who refused, Mikalai Statkevich, was sent back to prison on Sep 11, 2025 and freed only after a stroke in February 2026.

Belarus held 17 writers in jail across 2025, a mix of long-term detainees and new arrests, typically charged with extremism, defaming the president, inciting discord or organising actions against public order -- the continuing crackdown since Lukashenka's 2020 election. Fifteen had been released by mid-2026 through the September and December 2025 mass releases or in early 2026, including Nobel laureate Ales Bialacki, journalist Katsiaryna Andreyeva and scholar Uladzimir Matskevich. PEN America cautions that the releases do not signal political reform. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

CONVICTED, AND UNABLE TO FIND OUT THE SENTENCE. Belarus added "special proceedings" to its criminal procedure code in 2022, permitting conviction in absentia. UN experts report more than a hundred people convicted under it, and the procedural design is the record: those prosecuted are NOT NOTIFIED of the proceedings, cannot choose their defence lawyer, cannot take part remotely, and cannot obtain copies of their case file, the procedural documents or even the judgment. Those go only to a state-appointed lawyer who is under no legal duty to contact the client and routinely does not. JUDGMENTS ARE NOT PUBLISHED -- brief verdict summaries appear on government websites that cannot be reached from abroad. Olga Loiko, a former editor of the shuttered Tut.by, was convicted in absentia on charges including inciting hatred, tax evasion, organising a protest and calling for sanctions, AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO ESTABLISH WHAT HER SENTENCE IS. THE SCOPE WIDENED DELIBERATELY. Special proceedings were first aimed at dissidents, politicians and activists; from 2024 authorities began charging journalists, per the Belarusian Association of Journalists. In February 2025 amendments expanded the articles that can be tried this way to include discrediting the Republic of Belarus, insulting or libelling the president, and insulting an official. CPJ counted criminal cases against MORE THAN 80 exiled Belarusian journalists as of Apr 2026. THE PRISONER COUNT IS FALLING, AND NOT FOR A GOOD REASON: BAJ recorded 28 media workers jailed at the start of 2026, CPJ at least 23 in April, the IFJ and EFJ 21 in August. Those are not competing definitions but one declining figure, and it declines partly because prisoners are released straight into deportation -- recorded separately here. WHAT IT DOES TO THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED: homes raided, relatives detained and questioned, property seized. One journalist told CPJ that police went to his parents' workplace, and that the tactic works -- exiled journalists move into self-censorship. A 2023 presidential decree bars Belarusians abroad from obtaining identity and travel documents through consular services, the same passport mechanism recorded on this map for Russia. AND STATE TELEVISION DOXXED THEM. On Apr 2, 2026 the state channel STV broadcast the home address and phone number of exiled investigative journalist Stanislau Ivashkevich and personal details of twenty more. THE PRESENTER WAS RAMAN PRATASEVICH, who was himself seized when Belarus forced down a passenger flight in 2021 -- a past victim of the same transnational repression now delivering it. CPJ has asked Polish authorities to investigate claims that Ivashkevich was surveilled by Belarusian security services on Polish soil.

STATE TELEVISION SHOWED VIEWERS HOW TO GET INTO AN EXILED REPORTER'S FLAT IN WARSAW. On Apr 2, 2026 Belarus's STV broadcast the alleged phone number and address of investigative journalist Stanislau Ivashkevich of the Belarusian Investigative Center, with video directions to the apartment where he lives in Poland, private footage of him and his son, and personal details of 20 other journalists. The presenter was Raman Pratasevich, taken off a diverted Ryanair flight in 2021 and later pardoned; CPJ says he was confirmed in October 2025 as working for Belarusian intelligence. Twenty-one journalists tied to the Center face charges of 'calling for sanctions' and extremism. CPJ asked POLISH authorities to investigate claims that Ivashkevich was watched on Polish soil -- which makes this a question for the host country, not only for Minsk. By late April Polish police said they had no complaint on file and prosecutors had passed the matter up. Not established: any investigation result. Marker placed at Warsaw, where he lives; the broadcaster and the charges are Belarusian.

ONE REGIONAL NEWSPAPER, DISMANTLED OVER FOUR YEARS, WITH THE CHARGES ESCALATING EACH TIME. Intex-Press covered Baranavichy, a city in western Belarus. THE SEQUENCE, as documented by CPJ and the Belarusian Association of Journalists: in July 2022 its journalist Yury Hantsarevich was sentenced to two years and six months for facilitating extremist activities. The paper was stripped of its registration the same year. In February 2023 Baranavichy police raided the office and seized laptops, computers and a camera. In April 2023 a court declared its website and social media pages EXTREMIST MATERIALS, which in Belarus makes sharing them an offence for readers as well as staff. Journalists who had regrouped as the news site BAR24 were detained in early December 2024 -- six of them. In August 2025 four of those, Natallia Semianovich, Mikita Piatrouski, Ruslan Raviaka and Ludmila Zeliankova, were sentenced to years of house arrest for promoting extremist activity. THEN THE CHARGE CHANGED. On Feb 26, 2026, after a closed-door trial that began Feb 3, a Brest court convicted BAR24's former managers Uladzimir Yanukevich, 66, and Andrei Pakalenka, 44, of TREASON -- and sentenced them to 14 and 12 years. THAT ESCALATION IS THE POINT OF THIS RECORD. Extremism charges carry years; treason carries more than a decade, and reframes local reporting as an act against the state itself. The same outlet's staff moved from a two-and-a-half-year sentence in 2022 to fourteen years in 2026 without the work changing. Six journalists were convicted in Belarus within that single week. WHAT IT SHOWS THAT A PRISONER COUNT CANNOT: a newsroom can be closed, re-formed under a new name, and closed again, with each step producing a different legal category -- deregistration, extremist designation, house arrest, treason. Read as separate incidents these look like four unrelated cases. Read together they are one campaign against one masthead.

Belarus jailed roughly 25 to 31 journalists, the worst in its region, most over work for outlets the government brands extremist. Several detained for covering the 2020 protests against Lukashenko are serving terms of ten years or more.

Belarus has labeled more than 170 Telegram channels and chats, most run by independent media, as extremist, and authorities have warned that subscribing to or sharing from them can bring criminal liability of up to several years in prison. Dozens of people have been fined or jailed over subscriptions or comments, and after a 2021 shootout police arrested more than a hundred people over online remarks; a teacher and her tech-worker husband were jailed for exchanging reposts from such channels. The government frames the designations as fighting extremism; Human Rights Watch and exiled rights groups call it criminalizing what people read and say online.

OUTCOME: the fine is under appeal and nothing is settled. The European Commission fined X 120 million euros on 5 December 2025, the first non-compliance fine issued under the Digital Services Act, over transparency obligations, the design of its paid verification scheme -- which the Commission said made it harder for users to tell verified public figures from paying subscribers -- and restrictions on researcher access. X filed an appeal at the General Court of the European Union on 16 February 2026, announcing it on 20 February; the case is X Corp. v European Commission and it is the first judicial challenge to any DSA fine. X argues the decision followed an incomplete and superficial investigation, alleges procedural errors, a strained reading of its DSA obligations, breaches of the rights of defence and due process, and prosecutorial bias. Alliance Defending Freedom International is supporting the challenge and states that Elon Musk is personally liable for the fine; that characterisation is ADF's. The Commission says it will defend its position in court and has not commented further. Separate DSA investigations into X remain open, covering illegal content and information manipulation, and, opened in January 2026, the generation of sexualised deepfake images by its Grok chatbot. No hearing date, ruling or outcome is established. What would settle it: a General Court judgment in X Corp. v European Commission. TWO CASES, NOT ONE: the EU Official Journal of 4 May 2026 lists two actions lodged on 16 Feb 2026 -- Case T-120/26, X.AI Holdings v Commission (X's parent company is the named applicant), and Case T-121/26, brought by Elon Musk personally. Musk asks the court to annul the decision, or at least to annul it as addressed to him, or to cancel or reduce the fine, on the same eight grounds as the company. No hearing date has been set.

SETTLED ON 23 JULY 2026: the Council accepted Parliament's amendments, so the revived regime stands with end-to-end encrypted services walled off. It is Regulation (EU) 2026/1881, in force 31 July 2026 and applying until 3 April 2028. The Council said the concession does not carry over to the permanent regulation. The history: The interim ePrivacy derogation that let platforms voluntarily scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232, expired on 3 April 2026 after Parliament rejected an extension on 26 March by 311 votes to 228 with 92 abstentions. On 2 July 2026 the Council adopted the Commission's original text as its second-reading position, which raised the bar: at second reading Parliament can only reject or amend by an absolute majority of all members, reported as 360 or 361 of 720 depending on the source. On 9 July more MEPs voted to reject than to keep -- 314 for rejection, 276 against, 17 abstentions -- but the motion fell short of the absolute majority, so the measure survived a vote that a simple majority opposed. In a separate vote the same day Parliament adopted amendments walling end-to-end encrypted services off from the scheme; a further amendment limiting scanning to accounts identified by the judiciary did not reach the threshold. Because Parliament amended the Council's position, the text returned to the Council, which accepted the amendments on 23 July rather than using the three months it had. Euronews reports the derogation running to 3 April 2028 if it stands. EDRi's reading is that both sides won something. The permanent Child Sexual Abuse Regulation is still in trilogue and has not been adopted; nothing happened on 1 September; the sixth trilogue is scheduled for 29 September 2026.

The European Media Freedom Act is in force and several EU member states are still in breach of it, according to RSF's 2026 Index. EU countries generally hold leading positions, but the picture is mixed and moving the wrong way -- Estonia slipped from 2nd to 3rd on political pressure on the press alone. Recorded because this map's world coverage skews toward authoritarian states, and the erosion inside jurisdictions with strong written protections is the harder story to see. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Paivi Rasanen -- member of parliament, former interior minister, grandmother -- tweeted a Bible verse in 2019 questioning her church's sponsorship of Helsinki Pride. What followed was seven years of criminal process: multiple police interrogations, charges in 2021 under the criminal code chapter titled 'War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity' for 'agitation against a minority group' -- covering the tweet, a 2004 church pamphlet, and a radio debate -- and the prosecution of Bishop Juhana Pohjola for publishing the pamphlet. The district court acquitted both unanimously in 2022. The prosecutor appealed. The appeals court acquitted both unanimously in 2023. The prosecutor appealed again. On March 26, 2026 the Supreme Court finally split the difference: it acquitted Rasanen over the tweet but convicted her and the bishop, 3-2, of insult for keeping the twenty-year-old pamphlet available, imposing fines. She is weighing an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Whatever one makes of her views, the process was the punishment: two unanimous acquittals could not stop a state prosecutor from pursuing a parliamentarian into a seventh year over a tweet and a pamphlet.

On January 5, 2026 a Paris court convicted ten people -- eight men and two women, 41 to 65 -- of cyberharassment for posts claiming Brigitte Macron is a transgender man and likening her 24-year age gap with the president to pedophilia. One defendant, absent from court, got six months in prison; eight received suspended sentences of four to eight months; several had the social media accounts they posted from suspended for six months; all owe 10,000 euros jointly and must attend cyberbullying training. The court called the publications 'particularly degrading, insulting, and malicious' with cumulative harmful effects, and the first lady's daughter testified to the deterioration of her mother's health. The free-speech tension sits in plain view: an appeals court had already overturned the parallel defamation convictions, ruling that calling someone transgender is not an attack on their honor -- yet the harassment track produced prison terms and state-ordered account bans for posts about arguably the most public woman in France, while one defendant cast the trial as an attack on his 'freedom to think.' The Macrons are pressing the same claims against Candace Owens in a US court, where the First Amendment makes the outcome far less certain.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested stepping off his jet at Le Bourget on August 24, 2024 and indicted on twelve charges -- complicity in child-abuse material, drug trafficking and organized fraud on the platform, refusal to hand user data to investigators, and providing cryptography without proper declaration -- one of the only times the chief of a major platform has been criminally charged over failures to moderate what users do on it. Bail was 5 million euros, with twice-weekly police check-ins and a ban on leaving France. Prosecutors pointed to Telegram's near-total silence toward legal requests; civil-liberties advocates warned that criminalizing an operator for user content and for offering encryption reaches every private-messaging service. Judicial supervision was fully lifted in November 2025, but the investigation ground on into its second year with no trial, no resolution, and Durov's lawyers saying no evidence had established the charges.

Police came to a woman's home in northern France and arrested her over a Facebook post that called President Macron filth, after a local state office filed a complaint. She was charged with insulting the president of the republic, an offence that can carry a fine of 12,000 euros. She said she was astonished to be arrested and that the authorities wanted to make an example of her.

On a coordinated day of action in June 2025, German federal and state police carried out about 170 dawn raids on homes over online posts, seizing phones and computers, under criminal-code provisions on insulting politicians and incitement to hatred. Officials said about two thirds of cases involved right-wing statements, with some religious-extremist and left-wing cases, and defended it as enforcing legal limits; US officials and free-speech advocates condemned it as policing lawful opinion.

David Bendels, editor-in-chief of the AfD-aligned Deutschland-Kurier, posted a photomontage in February 2024 of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign edited to read 'I hate freedom of speech' -- the original, from a Holocaust-remembrance campaign, read 'We remember.' Police flagged the post to Faeser, she filed a criminal complaint, and on April 7, 2025 the Bamberg district court sentenced Bendels under Section 188 of the criminal code -- the 'defamation of persons in political life' provision expanded under the Merkel-era government -- to seven months imprisonment suspended for two years, a fine reported at 210 daily rates of his income, and a written apology to the minister. German press described it as the first such conviction of a journalist in the history of the Federal Republic. The court reasoned that unbiased viewers might not recognize the photo was altered, treating the satire as a false factual claim. Criticism came from well beyond his political corner: CDU constitutional lawyer Rupert Scholz and media lawyer Joachim Steinhoefel both called the meme legally unproblematic. Bendels appealed. The same Section 188 machinery drives the dawn raids and mass prosecutions for online insults documented elsewhere on this map.

In November 2024, Bavarian police searched the home of Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old pensioner, and seized a tablet after he reposted a meme on X that altered the Schwarzkopf hair-care logo to read Schwachkopf Professional (roughly professional idiot) over a photo of then economy minister Robert Habeck. Habeck had filed an insult complaint under a provision giving politicians heightened protection, but prosecutors said the court-ordered search rested mainly on a separate incitement suspicion tied to another post and was carried out during a nationwide day of action against antisemitic hate posts. Critics across the spectrum, including mainstream German outlets, called the raid disproportionate to a satirical meme and faulted Habeck for enabling it, while officials maintained the meme amounted to defaming a government official and that the search followed normal legal process. Niehoff was later fined about 1,350 euros, largely over reposts the court treated as banned symbols and incitement; he appealed and died in January 2026 with the case unresolved.

THREE COUNTRIES BUILT THE SAME MACHINE ON A TIMETABLE. Russia expanded in-absentia prosecution of exiles after February 2022; Belarus wrote "special proceedings" into its criminal procedure code in 2022; Azerbaijan amended its Criminal Procedures Code in December 2023 to allow the practice for the first time. Each is recorded separately on this map. Set side by side, the DESIGN FEATURES MATCH TOO CLOSELY TO BE COINCIDENCE, and naming the shared architecture is something only a map holding all three can do. ONE: THE DEFENDANT IS NOT TOLD. Russian journalists are often not notified of proceedings at all. Belarusians are not notified, cannot attend remotely, and cannot obtain the case file or even the judgment. Azerbaijani defendants living in Europe and the US learned of verdicts after the fact. TWO: A LAWYER IS APPOINTED WHO NEVER SPEAKS TO THE CLIENT. Belarus assigns state lawyers under no legal duty to make contact, who routinely refuse. Azerbaijan's eight reviewed verdicts used state-appointed lawyers with no contact with the absent defendants. In both, the appearance of representation is produced without the substance. THREE: THE PAPERWORK ROUTE HOME IS CLOSED. Russia refuses passport renewals at embassies, which blocks visa renewal in the countries people fled to. Belarus achieved the same by presidential decree in 2023, barring citizens abroad from obtaining identity and travel documents through consular services. A person is made undocumented in place. FOUR: THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED ARE THE LEVER. Russia searches registered addresses including relatives' homes, questions neighbours, seizes property, reads family correspondence and searches their devices at borders. Belarus raids homes, detains and questions relatives and seizes property. The sentence lands on someone who cannot be reached; the enforcement lands on someone who can. FIVE, AND IT IS THE POINT: THE CONVICTION IS AN INSTRUMENT, NOT A PUNISHMENT. Human Rights Watch says Azerbaijan's verdicts turn online speech into judgments usable for extradition requests, detention during international travel, and asset seizures. Russia's Federal Law No. 284-FZ, signed 4 Aug 2026, now does it by statute: a public Justice Ministry list of convicted exiles, frozen Russian accounts, bans on selling property, and no consular services. A prison term that can never be served is not the goal -- it is the document that other states, banks and border posts may act on. WHAT DIFFERS is the charge each reaches for: Russia's false-information article 207.3 and, for foreign correspondents, illegal border crossing; Belarus's discrediting the Republic, insulting the president and calling for sanctions; Azerbaijan's serious-crimes framing of online speech. The offence is local. The architecture is not. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether there is any direct borrowing between these states or whether the convergence is independent. Nothing in the sources reviewed here shows a transfer of legal drafting, and this record does not assert one. RSF describes the practice as spreading; that is an observation about pattern, not evidence of coordination.

In Feb 2025, just before the North Dakota trial began, Greenpeace International sued Energy Transfer in Amsterdam District Court, invoking a newly adopted European Union directive designed to protect people in the EU from abusive lawsuits aimed at stifling democratic participation. The claim is that Energy Transfer's North Dakota case against Greenpeace International was baseless and filed to silence and punish opponents. The Dutch case was still advancing as of Jun 2026. It matters beyond Greenpeace: it is the first substantial test of whether an EU forum can be used to push back on a US judgment obtained against a European defendant for protest activity, which is the question every internationally organised campaign now faces. The EU directive is new enough that there is no body of decisions interpreting it, so the outcome here will set the reference point.

Semyon Skrepetsky (real name Robert Kuzovkov), an exiled Russian caricaturist known for satirising Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenka and Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot dead in June 2026 in Biala Podlaska, Poland, where he had lived since fleeing Russia in 2021. Days earlier he had staged a one-man protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the killing bore the hallmarks of a political assassination; the perpetrators remain unconfirmed.

The FSB charged Pavel Durov with aiding terrorist activity on 29 July 2026 and placed him on an international wanted list. The charge follows a criminal case opened on 24 February 2026 under Part 1.1 of Article 205.1 of the Criminal Code, announced through the state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in an article it said was based on FSB materials. The FSB says Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence and by groups it calls terrorist and extremist to prepare sabotage, attacks and fraud, and says 46 users of a Telegram dating chatbot aged 12 to 22 have been detained across Russia since July 2025. State outlets put Telegram's involvement at more than 153,000 crimes since 2022, including 33,000 involving sabotage, terrorism or extremism, and say Roskomnadzor sent more than 150,000 ignored removal requests -- all state figures, not independently audited. Durov, who holds French and Emirati citizenship and lives outside Russia, says authorities fabricate pretexts to restrict Telegram and suppress privacy and free speech. Telegram denies being a haven for criminal activity. The charge is reported to carry up to life imprisonment. Context: Roskomnadzor has throttled and restricted Telegram and the state is promoting an alternative messenger, MAX. No trial or conviction is established.

THE SENTENCE IS TEMPLATED; THE FINE IS NOT. Comparing the in-absentia convictions of exiled Russian journalists side by side, the prison terms converge and the financial penalties do not. EIGHT YEARS RECURS: Ilya Varlamov (Aug 2025), Ekaterina Kotrikadze (Feb 2026), Tikhon Dzyadko (May 2026) all received eight years on effectively the same pairing of charges -- spreading "fakes" about the army plus evading foreign-agent duties -- and Varlamov and Dzyadko both drew an identical four-year ban on administering websites. Sergei Medvedev got ten, Anna Mongayt five, Ilya Azar four. THE FINES ARE NOT COMPARABLE AT ALL, and this is the finding. Varlamov was fined 99.5 MILLION ROUBLES, about $1.2 million, reported as the exact sum prosecutors said he earned in 2023. Dzyadko, convicted on the same charge pairing with the same sentence and the same website ban, was fined 250,000 ROUBLES -- roughly $3,400, and about four hundred times less. Prosecutors had asked for 5.9 million in his case and the court imposed a fortieth of that. For scale, a regional editor was fined 40,000 roubles for a Telegram post, and the standard administrative penalty for missing a foreign-agent label was raised from 30,000 to 50,000 roubles in 2025. WHAT THAT MEANS IN PRACTICE: a person who cannot be imprisoned because they are abroad receives a prison term that is largely symbolic, and a fine that is not. The fine is where discretion actually lives, and in at least one case it was set at a named individual's declared annual income rather than at any statutory level. WE TESTED THE OPPOSITE HYPOTHESIS AND IT FAILED: this map's working note assumed income-calibration might be the standard method. On the evidence available it is not standard -- it is available. THE ESCALATION THAT MAKES THESE SENTENCES BITE IS NOW LAW. Federal Law No. 284-FZ, signed 4 Aug 2026 and in force on publication, lets the Ministry of Justice list convicted Russians abroad who are 'evading' their sentence; listing freezes Russian bank accounts, bars sale of property and cars, and cuts off state e-services, credit, licences, notarial and consular services, with all income routed through one special account (own record). It passed the Duma on 22 July, not on the 1 March date first reported. That converts an unenforceable prison term into enforceable property and paperwork consequences. SCALE, ATTRIBUTED: RSF counts nearly 70 journalists prosecuted by Russia beyond its borders, and describes four leading figures tried in absentia within 48 hours in early October 2025. Kotrikadze and Valeria Ratnikova were formally arrested in absentia while living in the Netherlands. DATES AND OUTCOMES: Anna Mongayt, 5 years plus a 3-year website ban, Presnensky court, 2 Oct 2025 (prosecutors asked 8); Ilya Azar, 4 years plus a 5-year website ban, 3 Oct 2025, for two articles on the website of the 'undesirable' Deputies for a Peaceful Russia, alongside three former municipal deputies given the same term; Valeria Ratnikova, arrested in absentia in Oct 2025 and sentenced to 7.5 years by the Golovinsky court on 24 Mar 2026; Denis Kamalyagin, arrested in absentia in Feb 2024 and sentenced to 3 years by Pskov City Court on 19 Nov 2025. No fine was reported in any of these four cases. RSF itself is designated undesirable in Russia.

SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS FOR REPORTING ON RAPE BY SOLDIERS. On 24 Mar 2026 Moscow's Golovinsky District Court sentenced TV Rain presenter Valeria Ratnikova in absentia to 7.5 years in a penal colony for spreading 'false information' about the army. The case rested on four Telegram posts about her own reporting on alleged sexual violence by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian women and on looting by Russian troops. Prosecutors had asked for eight years. Ratnikova left Russia in 2022, was designated a foreign agent in December 2023, and was arrested in absentia in October 2025 while living in the Netherlands. Her TV Rain colleagues Ekaterina Kotrikadze (eight years, February 2026) and editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko were prosecuted the same way; all three were declared wanted and added to Russia's register of terrorists and extremists. Not established: whether a fine or website ban was added.

Through 2026 Russian authorities imposed broad mobile-internet and cellular shutdowns -- some orders lasting up to 12 months -- under vague public-safety justifications, banned protests in at least 40 cities, and arrested organizers; Human Rights Watch said the measures violate the ICCPR.

WITNESSES TESTIFIED THEY WERE UPSET; THE POSTS WERE LINKS. On Feb 16, 2026 two Moscow district courts sentenced TV Rain's Ekaterina Kotrikadze to 8 years and businessman Yevgeny Chichvarkin to 9, both in absentia, for spreading 'fakes' about the army and breaching foreign-agent rules. Kotrikadze's case rested on 2022 Telegram posts about alleged war crimes; Chichvarkin's on an August 2024 Instagram post of a Russian Anti-War Committee statement. The Moscow Times reports that witnesses in both trials testified they suffered emotional distress after reading the posts. On May 12, 2026 TV Rain editor Tikhon Dzyadko got 8 years over two Telegram posts that, per Mediazona, linked to a report from Bucha and a New York Times investigation into civilian deaths near Kyiv. Published reporting, linked to, became the substance of a criminal case. Not established: whether 'distress' testimony was used against Dzyadko too.

Russia escalated platform blocking in 2026: it officially blocked WhatsApp on February 12 -- the last widely used encrypted Western messenger in the country -- after fully blocking YouTube and throttling then blocking Telegram through March and April, while banning advertising on blocked platforms. Authorities promoted MAX, a state-backed messenger that shares user data with the government and lacks end-to-end encryption, as the sanctioned alternative.

Russian courts have handed exiled journalists long prison terms in absentia for war posts, including a five-year sentence over Telegram posts about the bombing of Odessa and an eight-year term over posts about the army, as authorities blocked more than 25,000 websites for war coverage.

THREE YEARS FOR A MONOLOGUE AND A MISSING LABEL. On 19 Nov 2025 Pskov City Court sentenced Denis Kamalyagin, editor of the regional paper Pskovskaya Guberniya, in absentia to three years in a penal colony and a three-year ban on running websites. He was convicted on two counts: discrediting the armed forces, for a YouTube monologue recorded abroad saying Russian forces strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and kill civilians; and breaking foreign-agent rules, for Telegram posts published without the mandatory foreign-agent label. Kamalyagin was among the first journalists Russia listed as a media foreign agent, in December 2020. A criminal case followed in November 2023, a travel ban in December 2023, and a second case with his arrest in absentia in February 2024. The foreign-agent count applies only after earlier administrative penalties, so the prison term sits on top of a chain of paperwork fines. No fine was reported in the verdict.

THE SENTENCE IS THE SMALLEST PART OF IT. RSF, cross-checking with the Justice for Journalists Foundation, counts 66 media professionals arrested or convicted IN ABSENTIA by Russia since the February 2022 invasion -- roughly TWO A MONTH across 44 months, peaking at four a month in the second half of 2024, with 15 in the third quarter of 2025 alone. The average sentence since March 2022 is EIGHT YEARS, which independently confirms what comparing individual cases on this map already suggested: the prison term is templated. Journalists are often not notified of the proceedings at all, so no defence is organised. WHAT ACTUALLY REACHES THE PERSON is everything else. A conviction in absentia triggers searches at their registered address in Russia -- INCLUDING RELATIVES' HOMES -- questioning of neighbours, and seizure of personal property. It makes banking and administrative activity in Russia effectively impossible. Family members who stayed have phones and computers searched at airports and border crossings and their correspondence read. THE PART THAT REACHES ACROSS BORDERS: some journalists are refused PASSPORT RENEWALS at Russian embassies, which cuts off their ability to obtain or extend visas in the countries they fled to -- a conviction in Moscow becoming an immigration problem in Amsterdam or Riga. Others face expulsion or extradition in states that cooperate with Moscow on security, including countries they merely transit. AND FOR SOME IT HAS MEANT WORSE. The longest term recorded is 14 years, imposed on Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon on Jul 1, 2024; he survived two assassination attempts in Kyiv, in September 2024 and June 2025, the second alleged perpetrator arrested while preparing it. Christo Grozev, formerly Bellingcat's lead Russia investigator, and Roman Dobrokhotov of The Insider also survived attempts, linked to a network of Bulgarian nationals convicted in the United Kingdom. RSF's conclusion is that a conviction can mark a journalist as someone to be eliminated. THE FOREIGN-AGENT SYSTEM FEEDS IT. Designation obliges a person to open a specific rouble account, attach a disclaimer to every publication and file a monthly financial report -- obligations most exiles cannot meet. A bill adopted Sep 25, 2025 allows criminal prosecution from the FIRST violation, where two in a calendar year were previously required. The list now exceeds 1,000 people and organisations, about two-thirds of them journalists and media outlets, per OVD-Info. NOT ONLY RUSSIA: RSF reports the practice is now widely used in Belarus and beginning in Azerbaijan, where the first cases against journalists were recorded in spring 2025. The 66 figure EXCLUDES pending cases, and a suspended case can be reopened at any time.

FOUR YEARS FOR TWO ARTICLES. On 3 Oct 2025 a Moscow court (reported as the Nikulinsky District Court) sentenced journalist Ilya Azar in absentia to four years in prison and five years' ban on administering websites for 'organising the activity of an undesirable organisation'. The organisation is Deputies for a Peaceful Russia, an anti-war association of former local councillors based in Germany and declared undesirable in 2024. Three other former Moscow municipal deputies -- Ilya Glek, Elena Rusakova and Sergey Vlasov -- received the same four years. The prosecution's case was that the four had jointly edited and published two articles on the association's website. Azar, a former deputy in Khamovniki and a designated foreign agent, lives outside Russia and has said a return is now plainly impossible. No fine was reported. The charge matters as much as the term: it treats writing for a banned association as organising it.

FIVE YEARS FOR FIVE POSTS. On 2 Oct 2025 Moscow's Presnensky District Court sentenced TV Rain journalist Anna Mongayt in absentia to five years in a penal colony for spreading 'false information' about the Russian army, plus a three-year ban on running websites. Prosecutors had asked for eight. The case was built on her Telegram channel: two posts about strikes on Odesa, the city she is from; an announcement of a stream with a rabbi and an Orthodox bishop who opposed the war; a remark on the Trump-Putin negotiations; and a sarcastic comment on a Putin speech. She had been placed on the wanted list in August 2025 and says every post rests on real facts. She lives abroad, so the prison term cannot be enforced unless she returns; if the Justice Ministry lists her under the August 2026 law on convicts 'evading' sentences abroad, it could reach her bank accounts, property and documents in Russia. No fine was reported.

THE FINE WAS SIZED TO HIS INCOME. On Aug 14, 2025 Moscow's Meshchansky District Court sentenced blogger Ilya Varlamov in absentia to eight years in a general-regime penal colony on two counts: spreading false information about the Russian armed forces out of political hatred (Criminal Code art. 207.3 pt 2(d)) and evading the duties of a foreign agent (art. 330.1 pt 2). It also fined him 99.5 MILLION ROUBLES, about $1.2 million -- reported as the exact amount prosecutors said he earned in 2023 -- and barred him from running websites or social media for four years. The prison term is the headline; the fine is the mechanism, because it is calibrated to take a specific person's declared annual income rather than set at a statutory level. WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID: the false-information count rests on a single YouTube video published Nov 23, 2023 reporting on Russian strikes on residential buildings in Kryvyi Rih and Odesa. The foreign-agent count cites 19 instances of publishing without the required disclaimer, after he was designated a foreign agent in March 2023 and twice held administratively liable. Varlamov runs a travel and urbanism channel with more than five million subscribers and has lived outside Russia since the 2022 invasion; the trial ran in absentia with him on the international wanted list, and his defence asked for acquittal. In February the same court had ordered funds seized from his bank accounts without stating reasons. A DATE CORRECTION WORTH RECORDING: this was carried in our research notes as an August 2026 sentencing, taken from CPJ's Russia repression page. That page is a ROLLING TRACKER, so entries read as current whenever you open it. Every primary account -- OVD-Info, The Moscow Times, Novaya Gazeta Europe, Izvestia reporting from the courtroom -- dates it to Aug 14, 2025. The event is a year older than the note suggested.

Russia has criminally prosecuted around 692 people for spreading false information or discrediting the army since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, much of it over online and social media posts. In one case a man was sentenced to 13 years for writing the number of Russian war dead on a bus stop wall.

A BORDER-CROSSING CHARGE AIMED AT FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS. Alongside the false-information article used against Russian journalists, Russia has applied ARTICLE 322 of its Criminal Code -- illegal border crossing -- to foreign reporters who filed from the Kursk region after Ukrainian forces entered it. A wave of in-absentia arrest orders in October 2024 named British journalist Nick Paton Walsh of CNN, Simone Traini and Stefania Battistini of Italy's public broadcaster RAI, and Mircea Barbu of the Romanian outlet HotNews.ro, who was also targeted with death threats on Russian Telegram channels. Several Ukrainian journalists have been ordered arrested on the same basis. WHY THE CHARGE MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS: it does not allege anything about what was reported. It criminalises having been present, which converts frontline reporting itself into an offence and requires no argument about accuracy or intent. RSF states this violates international humanitarian law, specifically Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which protects journalists in armed conflict. THE PRACTICAL EFFECT ON A FOREIGN NATIONAL is not imprisonment but movement: an outstanding Russian arrest order follows a reporter into any state that cooperates with Moscow on security matters, including places they only pass through.

RELEASED, BUT ONLY OUT OF THE COUNTRY. On 1 Aug 2024 Russia freed 16 prisoners in a 26-person exchange in Ankara brokered by Turkish intelligence, among them opposition politicians Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov. None of the three chose to leave. At a press conference in Bonn the next day Yashin called it an illegal expulsion against his will and said he had refused to seek a pardon so he could stay in Russia; Kara-Murza said they all refused to write pardon requests and were pardoned anyway. The mechanism matches Belarus's (see wsp-by-release-into-exile): freedom is conditioned on removal, which ends the prisoner's political presence at home without the state conceding anything. Not established: the text of the pardon decrees.

Roman Ivanov, a reporter with the independent outlet RusNews, was sentenced in March 2024 to seven years in prison over three social-media posts about Russia's war in Ukraine: a VKontakte post about a UN report on war crimes and two Telegram posts about the Bucha killings. He was convicted under the law criminalizing false information about the army, passed days after the 2022 invasion. He is one of dozens prosecuted under that law. The Kremlin says it bars discrediting the military, while press-freedom groups call it a tool to punish reporting that contradicts the official narrative.

Maria Ponomarenko, a Russian journalist with the outlet RusNews, was prosecuted over a March 2022 Telegram post stating that Russian forces had bombed the drama theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Arrested in St. Petersburg in April 2022, she was sentenced in February 2023 to six years under Russia's law against spreading false information about the armed forces, barred from journalism, and later given additional time on disputed prison charges. Russian authorities deny their forces struck the theatre and treat such posts as criminal false information; Amnesty International and press-freedom groups, citing independent findings that Russian jets bombed the building, say she was jailed simply for condemning the war.

SIX JOURNALISTS HAVE LEFT THE COUNTRY FOR THEIR SAFETY, WEEKS BEFORE THE VOTE. Ahead of Serbia's Oct 25, 2026 elections, CPJ documents a run of physical incidents against the press: on Aug 29 in Uzice a police officer attacked Masina reporter Marko Miletic and a stone hit an RTS cameraman; on Aug 24 in Kraljevo men shoved away two local reporters; in June police detained three freelance photographers at a Belgrade gathering and a man grabbed the phone of Veran Matic, who chairs the ANEM media association, as he filmed. N1's news director has received death threats. Matic says six journalists have relocated abroad for their safety. Not established: whether anyone has been charged for any of these incidents.

The rapper Pablo Hasel was sent to prison in 2021 over a song and dozens of tweets that insulted the monarchy and were judged to glorify the defunct armed groups ETA and GRAPO, including calling a former king a mafia boss. He was convicted under a 2015 public security law that critics call the gag law; supporters said the posts crossed into glorifying terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights declared his complaint inadmissible in 2023, and his jailing set off days of protests.

Salwan Momika and Salwan Najem staged four Quran burnings in Stockholm in 2023 -- protests that triggered riots abroad, a diplomatic crisis, Sweden's terror threat level rising to four of five, and an Iraqi city offering two million dollars and a golden Quran for Momika's death. Sweden prosecuted the two men for 'agitation against an ethnic or national group.' On January 29, 2025, hours before the verdict was due, Momika was shot dead in his apartment in Sodertalje; the prime minister said a foreign power may have been involved, five arrests produced no charges, and Najem posted 'I'm next.' On February 3 the court convicted Najem on four counts, holding that the pair's remarks about Muslims 'exceeded free-speech protections by a wide margin' while carefully noting that burning a Quran is not in itself a hate crime and sacred texts enjoy no special protection. He received a suspended sentence and a fine of about 450 euros and appealed. The case put both realities on one docket: a state prosecuting provocative religious criticism, and an assassin -- possibly serving a foreign bounty -- delivering the verdict first.

FIFTEEN YEARS, IN PERSON, IN AN OCCUPIED CITY. A Russian-installed court in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region sentenced Iryna Levchenko, a 64-year-old retired Ukrainian journalist from Melitopol, to 15 years for espionage on Sep 4, 2026, alleging she passed information to Ukrainian intelligence. She had stopped working as a journalist in February 2022, when Russian forces took the city, and was detained in May 2023 together with her husband, who was released in August 2024. CPJ says she has been held in harsh conditions with little contact with her family. Not established: what evidence was presented, or whether she could be part of a prisoner exchange.

Russian airstrikes on Ukraine's energy and telecommunications infrastructure repeatedly disrupted internet connectivity in 2025, a cross-border form of shutdown imposed as part of the means and methods of warfare.

THE LONGEST IN-ABSENTIA TERM RSF HAS RECORDED, AND THEN THE ATTEMPTS TO ENFORCE IT BY OTHER MEANS. On Jul 1, 2024 a Moscow military court sentenced Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon, who lives in Kyiv, to 14 years in absentia for calls to terrorism, 'false information' about the army and incitement, over YouTube videos from 2022. Russia had put him on its wanted list and named him a foreign agent that year. The sentence could not be served; Ukraine's security service says something else was tried instead. On Sep 3, 2024 the SBU said it had detained four FSB agents in Kyiv gathering data on public figures marked for killing, Gordon among them. On Jun 23, 2025 it said it had stopped two more plots: a network run by a former Poltava MP planning a bomb or a missile or drone strike, and a Dagestani group offered $400,000. Every plot detail and the attribution to the Kremlin come from the SBU and are not independently confirmed. Not established: any conviction in Ukraine over the plots.

PARLIAMENT IS ASKING WHETHER ITS OWN ONLINE SAFETY ACT WORKS. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee opened an inquiry on 27 July 2026 into the implementation, enforcement and impact of the Online Safety Act 2023, putting 14 questions and saying plainly that SERIOUS CONCERNS HAVE BEEN RAISED THAT THE REGIME IS CURRENTLY INEFFECTIVE. Its two-part framing is what makes it worth recording: it asks whether OFCOM has been sufficiently effective and timely in enforcement, AND whether shortcomings in the LEGISLATION ITSELF are limiting the regime -- so the statute is under review by the chamber that passed it, not only the regulator under review by government. The principal illegal-content and child-protection duties came into force in 2025 and Ofcom moved into active monitoring and enforcement over the following year. THE REGULATOR IS REVIEWING ITSELF AT THE SAME TIME: Ofcom's chair Sir Ian Cheshire set out a review of the regulator in a 15 July 2026 letter to ministers -- its operating model, staffing, enforcement framework and powers -- due to conclude in early autumn 2026, with some recommendations possibly needing government support or new legislation. The sharper line that Ofcom may need more funds, new powers and a different operating model comes from his Financial Times interview, as reported by Computing. A regulator saying it lacks the powers to do the job is a different claim from critics saying it lacks the will, and both are on the record here. ONE INQUIRY, DEADLINE MOVED. The committee's own work page now gives 4pm on 21 September 2026 for written evidence, replacing the 7 September date in its launch notice; no separate Commons inquiry was found. That deadline has passed. Oral evidence so far: Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza (1 Sep) and Ofcom officials Mark Bunting, Suzanne Cater and Oliver Griffiths (15 Sep); a further session is listed for 13 October. No report date is set. WHY IT MATTERS BEYOND BRITAIN: the OSA is the most-cited model for age-assurance and platform-duty legislation on this map, invoked in US state bills and in the EU debate. A finding by its own parliament that the regime is not working would travel.

THE ONLINE SAFETY ACT'S TOP TIER GOES TO COURT. On 10 Jul 2026 Ofcom published its register of categorised services, placing Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit in Category 1 -- the tier with the heaviest extra duties, including on fraudulent advertising and transparency about illegal content. By September Meta had appealed the Category 1 designation of Instagram and WhatsApp to the Upper Tribunal, arguing the rules should not reach private one-to-one or small-group messaging; it says it disputes Ofcom's interpretation, not the Act. Roblox and Quora are also contesting Category 1 status, and TikTok and X are resisting Ofcom information demands. Separately, Meta's May 2026 judicial review over basing fees and penalties on global turnover is reported to reach the High Court in October. Ofcom says it will robustly defend its decisions; government figures accuse the companies of stalling. Not established: tribunal hearing dates, and whether any duties are suspended meanwhile. ADD/REVISE: Ofcom has confirmed that four designations are under appeal -- Instagram and WhatsApp (Meta), Roblox and Quora. The grounds of the Roblox and Quora appeals and any hearing dates have not been published. Meta's separate judicial review of fees and penalties based on global turnover (AC-2025-LON-004500; permission granted 6 Mar 2026) is listed for 13-14 Oct 2026.

ABOUT 3,500 ARRESTS FOR SUPPORTING A BANNED GROUP, AND THE COURTS HAVE DISAGREED ON WHETHER THE BAN IS LAWFUL. The UK proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 after members sprayed paint on military aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. Since then people holding signs supporting it have been arrested in large numbers: Defend Our Juries counted nearly 3,000 by March 2026, and Middle East Eye put it at about 3,500 by 30 Jul 2026, with more than 1,500 facing terrorism charges. On 13 Feb 2026 the High Court ruled the ban unlawful -- only three of hundreds of the group's actions met the terrorism definition, and the ban disproportionately interfered with speech and assembly. The Met paused arrests, then resumed on 26 Mar, saying it enforces the law as it stands. On 15 Jun 2026 a five-judge Court of Appeal reversed, finding the ban proportionate and owed deference on national security. The Supreme Court granted co-founder Huda Ammori permission to appeal on one ground on 29 Jul 2026 (a second was refused); the hearing is listed for 4-5 Nov 2026 (UKSC/2026/0099). Not established: how many sign-holders have been convicted. SIX ORGANISERS FACE OLD BAILEY TERRORISM CHARGES FOR ZOOM CALLS. On 3 Sep 2025 the CPS charged six Defend Our Juries campaigners -- among them former government lawyer Tim Crosland -- under s.12 of the Terrorism Act with arranging, managing or addressing meetings in support of Palestine Action, over Zoom calls and demonstrations in London, Manchester and Cardiff. Middle East Eye counted 42 charges between them; the prosecutors' per-person figures may total differently. They were bailed over prosecutors' objection on a tagged curfew and barred from supporting the group. A provisional four-week Old Bailey trial was set for 22 Jun 2026. Not established: whether that trial took place or was adjourned, and how many sign-holders have been convicted under s.13.

On 13 May 2026 Ofcom fined the provider of an overseas online forum 950,000 pounds, finding it in breach of illegal-content duties under sections 9, 10, 20, 21, 23 and 102(8) of the Online Safety Act. Ofcom decided not to name the forum or its provider and this record follows that decision. It was the first service Ofcom investigated under the Act. On 20 July 2026 Ofcom announced it would take no further legal action: the provider had geoblocked the vast majority of UK users, further changes would affect users outside the UK and so fall outside UK jurisdiction, and Ofcom said it lacks power to seek a business disruption order for non-payment of a fine alone, cannot obtain a conditional order that would take effect if the geoblock were lifted, and cannot bring criminal proceedings on these facts. The fine remains unpaid and Ofcom said it was still looking at ways to recover it. Ofcom's enforcement director Suzanne Cater said the powers had been used to the fullest extent available and pointed to the geoblock and to search engines removing links as the practical result. Ofcom is working with government on strengthening enforcement powers as part of a wider review. The objection, from Reason, spiked and lawyer Preston Byrne, is that Ofcom asserted jurisdiction over a site accessible from the UK while the site had already blocked UK visitors, that the same reasoning would let any state fine any website reachable within its borders, and that a US-based provider is beyond both the First Amendment line and any realistic collection. Ofcom's position is that being based outside the UK does not put a service outside the Act's scope. Campaigners including bereaved families pressed Ofcom to act and criticised its earlier reluctance. Death-toll figures attributed to the forum in the UK vary across accounts from more than 130 to at least 164 and are counts by campaigners and reporters, not an audited register. This record is about the reach of a regulator, and deliberately carries no detail about the forum's content.

Hampshire police arrested a man at his home, in an encounter filmed and shared widely, over a social-media image that reshaped the LGBT pride flag into a swastika, citing the Malicious Communications Act and telling him a person had been caused anxiety. The local police and crime commissioner publicly questioned whether the response was proportionate or necessary.

Hamit Coskun, a Turkish political refugee, burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge in February 2025 to protest Erdogan's government, announcing the protest on social media beforehand. A passerby attacked him with a knife at the scene -- and when Coskun was prosecuted for a religiously aggravated public order offence, part of the Crown's evidence that his conduct caused 'harassment, alarm or distress' was the attack on him. A magistrate convicted him in June 2025, fining him 240 pounds and telling him he held a deep-seated hatred of Islam; his attacker received a suspended sentence. Critics from the Free Speech Union to the National Secular Society called it blasphemy law returning through the back door -- abolished in England and Wales in 2008. In October 2025 Mr Justice Bennathan overturned the conviction at Southwark Crown Court, ruling that free expression 'must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.' The CPS appealed to the High Court to reinstate the conviction and lost again in February 2026, with the Free Speech Union calling the campaign to convict one man for burning his own book a humiliating defeat.

Armed officers detained writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow in 2025 over posts on X he had made from the United States, one of several high-profile UK cases that drew international scrutiny of police acting on online speech.

Two statutes give British police the power to arrest someone for what they post: section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalise sending communications that are indecent, obscene, menacing or grossly offensive. In 2023 police made 12,183 arrests under them. Ministry of Justice figures show 1,119 people were convicted and sentenced -- fewer than one in ten of those arrested. Sentencings have fallen by almost half since 2015, when 1,995 were found guilty, while arrests rose: forces recorded 7,734 in 2019, so 2023 was an increase of almost 58% on the pre-pandemic figure. The Metropolitan Police made the most arrests of any force, 1,709. The commonest reason an arrest does not end in a sentence is recorded as evidential difficulties, most often that the complainant does not support further action. Peers debating the figures noted that a system arresting 12,000 people a year and convicting 1,100 has arrest criteria that are seriously flawed, and that officers are spending their time on it. IMPORTANT SOURCING CAVEAT: the government does not publish arrest data broken down by these offence codes. The 12,000-a-year and 30-a-day figures come from a Times analysis of freedom-of-information returns from individual police forces, and not every force supplied data. Parliament has adopted and debated the numbers, but they are a journalistic reconstruction rather than a Home Office statistic, and should be cited that way. National in scope; pinned at Westminster.

Non-crime hate incidents were introduced in 2014: a category for words that are not criminal, which police are nonetheless directed to record and retain against the person who said them. More than 133,000 have been logged since, above 13,000 a year. Peers raised in debate that some of those whose names sit in police files were children whose words were recorded when they were below the age of criminal responsibility, and which may be held against them for the rest of their lives. Nobody in this dataset is charged, tried or fined. That is exactly why it belongs on this map rather than being left off as insufficiently serious: it is the consequence-without-charge mechanism in its purest institutional form, the same logic as an officer at the door advising someone to stop posting, except recorded permanently and at a scale of thirteen thousand a year. The practical effect is a police record attached to lawful speech, discoverable in some vetting checks, generated without any of the procedural protections that attach to an accusation of a crime. National in scope; pinned at Westminster.

SIX PEOPLE JAILED IN LONDON FOR HUNTING TWO JOURNALISTS ON RUSSIA'S BEHALF. On May 12, 2025 the Old Bailey sentenced six Bulgarian nationals to more than 50 years in total for spying for Russia, with ringleader Orlin Roussev getting 10 years 8 months. Prosecutors said he took instructions from Jan Marsalek, acting for Russian intelligence. Two of the targets were reporters. Christo Grozev, then Bellingcat's lead Russia investigator, was followed across several countries from December 2020 to January 2023, and the group explored a scheme to entrap him. Roman Dobrokhotov of The Insider was followed from November 2022; one operative sat next to him on a flight from Budapest to Berlin, and the group discussed kidnapping him before rejecting it as too risky. RSF says both men have also been convicted in absentia in Russia. Not established here: those Russian sentences, or that any physical attack was carried out -- the court record describes surveillance and plans. NOTE: this map's absentia records had said both men survived assassination attempts, following RSF; the UK court record describes surveillance, a laptop theft, an entrapment scheme and a discussed kidnapping -- not an attempt on either man's life.

Julian Foulkes, a 71-year-old retired special constable from Gillingham, replied on X to a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches in November 2023: 'Dear @SuellaBraverman -- as someone who was on one of the "hate marches", if you call me an antisemite I will sue you.' Someone reported the post as offensive, and the same day six Kent Police officers arrived at his home, handcuffed him, searched the house, seized his devices, and held him in a cell for eight hours. On legal advice he accepted a caution. In May 2025, after the case drew national attention, Kent Police apologized, ruled the caution should never have been issued, and expunged it from his record -- a rare formal admission that a British force had wrongly criminalized lawful online speech. Foulkes, who had spent a career in policing, said free speech 'is clearly under attack.'

British police make more than 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages, according to an April 2025 freedom of information report by The Times, which counted over 12,000 arrests in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Arrests have more than doubled since 2017, though fewer than one in ten led to a sentence. A separate count found 292 people charged under the 2023 Online Safety Act for false or threatening communications by February 2025. The government and prosecutors say the laws protect targeted communities; the Free Speech Union, Big Brother Watch, and Freedom House warn the vague offences chill speech and in some cases punish expression protected by international standards.

David Wootton, 40, was arrested and convicted of sending an offensive message online after posting images of himself at a Halloween party dressed to reference Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber -- an Arabic-style headdress, a slogan about Ariana Grande on his T-shirt, and a rucksack marked Boom and TNT. He admitted the offence and faces up to two years in prison; he is appealing the conviction. The Free Speech Union, whose director said forces are over-zealous in pursuing alleged speech crimes, reported assisting around half a dozen people being prosecuted under section 127 or section 1 at that time. This record is here precisely because the conduct is ugly. Costume-mocking the perpetrator of an attack that killed children is grotesque, and it is also not violence, not a threat to any identifiable person, and not incitement. A statute producing 12,000 arrests a year is defined by what it reaches at the margin, and a map that logged only sympathetic defendants would describe a speech regime that does not exist. The source does not state where he lives or was arrested, so this record is pinned nationally at Westminster rather than inferring a city from the costume.

Between the Online Safety Act taking effect in 2023 and February 2025, about 292 people were charged under its new false-communications and threatening-communications offences, on top of more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under older communications laws. Civil-liberties groups warned the offences were being applied to speech protected under international human-rights standards.

Faced with a UK order to break iCloud encryption, Apple on Feb. 24, 2025 disabled Advanced Data Protection for UK users rather than build a backdoor -- leaving Britons unable to end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups, photos, drive files, and notes, a security downgrade for an entire country.

Two days after the Southport murders, Jamie Michael -- a former Royal Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan -- posted a 12-minute Facebook video saying the country was under attack and directing his anger, he said, at the killer and at illegal or radicalized immigration. A staffer in the office of a Labour member of the Senedd reported the video to police, and the Crown prosecuted him under Section 2(1) of the Public Order Act 1986 for stirring up racial hatred -- a charge carrying years in prison. At Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in February 2025 he told the jury he had been clumsy with his words but was speaking as a frightened parent, and his defence argued the video was protected political expression under Article 10. The jury returned a unanimous not guilty verdict in 17 minutes -- one of the fastest acquittals of the post-Southport prosecutions, and a data point his lawyers used to argue the CPS charging threshold for speech had collapsed.

Six Hertfordshire police officers arrested Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine at their home, in front of their child, over emails and WhatsApp-group messages criticizing their daughter's primary school. They were held for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications, then released with no charges. Months later the force admitted the arrest was unlawful and paid the couple 20,000 pounds; the police and crime commissioner said parents should be able to raise concerns without a knock at the door from police.

UK police make on the order of 12,000 arrests a year, roughly thirty a day, for offensive online messages under Section 127 of the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act, an almost 58 percent rise since before the pandemic, prompting warnings of a free-expression chill.

Since 2014 British police logged roughly 133,000 non-crime hate incidents, records of lawful but offensive speech, including over social media posts, kept on file even when no crime occurred. Facing criticism, the government moved to scrap the category in 2026.

On Remembrance Sunday in November 2024, two uniformed Essex Police officers came to the home of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson and told her she was under investigation over a post on X she had written a year earlier and since deleted, which a complainant said had stirred up racial hatred. Pearson said she was told it was a non-crime hate incident; the force later said it was a live criminal investigation under the Public Order Act and disputed her account. The investigation was dropped weeks later and Pearson sued the force. Police framed it as a proper inquiry into a possible offence; Pearson and free-speech campaigners called the home visit over a deleted year-old post a chilling overreach.

Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a Facebook post during the 2024 unrest after the Southport killings that called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. Prosecutors treated it as stirring up racial hatred; critics argued the sentence was disproportionate, noting that some who took part in physical violence received comparable terms.

Jordan Parlour was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court in August 2024 to 20 months in prison for Facebook posts encouraging an attack on the Britannia Hotel, which housed asylum seekers, during the unrest that followed the Southport killings. He was the first person jailed for online-only conduct in the 2024 riots. The judge said his posts incited violence toward the building and the people inside; civil-liberties commentators argued the online sentences were heavier than those handed to some who joined the disorder in person, raising proportionality concerns.

Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old businesswoman near Chester, was arrested in August 2024 and held for 36 hours on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred and false communications after she reposted a false name for the Southport attacker with the caveat that it was unconfirmed, then deleted it on learning it was wrong. Police dropped the case weeks later for insufficient evidence, partly because the Online Safety Act false-communications offence requires that the sender knew the information was false. Authorities cited the risk of inflaming tensions; the Free Speech Union and Spofforth said an ordinary person was made an example of and detained over a deleted post she was never charged for.

Lee Dunn, from Egremont in Cumbria, pleaded guilty under Section 127 of the Communications Act to sending grossly offensive messages and was jailed during the wave of unrest in the summer of 2024. Prosecutors said online offending tied to the disorder would be brought to court swiftly.

The longest sentences of the August 2024 crackdown went to people who never left their homes. Wayne O'Rourke, who ran an X account with roughly 90,000 followers, got three years at Lincoln Crown Court for stirring up racial hatred through his posts during the disorder -- the judge told him 'the flames were fanned by keyboard warriors like you.' Tyler Kay of Northampton got 38 months, jailed just two days after tweeting that asylum hotels should be set alight; he had copied the wording of Lucy Connolly's tweet, he told the court, as a protest against her arrest, then tagged the police force in a post promising he would not be arrested. Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old carer from Cheshire with no criminal record who lived what her lawyer called a quiet, sheltered life, got 15 months for a single Facebook comment -- 'Don't protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it' -- posted in a village community group; the prosecution accepted it was reckless anger rather than genuine intent. Whether these were incitement rightly punished or disproportionate sentences for words, the trio became the reference cases in the debate over Britain's two-tier response to the riots: swifter and heavier for posts than many sentences handed down for violence.

A Scottish man was convicted in 2022 for a grossly offensive tweet about the late fundraiser Captain Tom Moore and ordered to perform 150 hours of unpaid work, a case critics cited to argue the offensive-message standard is too elastic.

Harry Miller, a former police officer from Lincolnshire, posted a set of gender-critical tweets in late 2018 and early 2019. After a complaint, Humberside Police logged them as a non-crime hate incident and an officer contacted him at his workplace, warning that although he had committed no crime, escalation could become criminal, and advising him to stop. In February 2020 the High Court ruled the police action a disproportionate interference with his right to free expression, finding the tweets lawful with no risk of any offence, while upholding the underlying guidance. Police said such guidance aims to stop low-level hostility from escalating; Miller and free-speech campaigners called the visit a chilling attempt to police lawful opinion.

Mark Meechan, a Scottish YouTuber known as Count Dankula, was convicted in March 2018 at Airdrie Sheriff Court under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for posting a grossly offensive video in which he trained his girlfriend's pug to raise its paw to Nazi phrases. He was fined 800 pounds, and appeals up to the UK Supreme Court were refused. Meechan said the clip was a joke meant to annoy his girlfriend and free-speech advocates called the prosecution overreach against satire, while the court and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities held that a reasonable person would find it grossly offensive and that it normalized antisemitic attitudes.

A nineteen-year-old was convicted in 2018 for quoting rap lyrics containing a slur on Instagram as a tribute to a friend who had died; the conviction was overturned on appeal the following year.

Walid Kechida, a 25-year-old supporter of Algeria's Hirak protest movement, ran a Facebook page called Hirak Memes that mocked the government. Police arrested him in Setif in April 2020, and in January 2021 a court sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine for insulting the president, insulting police, and offending the precepts of Islam through memes and other online posts. Algerian authorities treated the posts as criminal insults to the president and religion; Human Rights Watch, the Algerian League for Human Rights, and Amnesty International said he was jailed for satire as part of a wider crackdown on Hirak activists and social-media users.

PROSECUTED FOR FORWARDING. Tresor Muntu, a journalist with Centrale Radio Television, was detained in Likasi on Sep 15, 2026 and moved to Kasapa Central Prison in Lubumbashi on charges of criminal defamation and publishing false news. His act: sharing, in five WhatsApp groups, a post on X written by another journalist, Patrick Lokala, that accused the vice-president of Haut-Katanga's provincial assembly of using her influence to protect her sister in a land dispute. He faces up to five years. Not established: a court date, or whether the author of the post is being pursued too.

Internet access was repeatedly cut in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the 2025 conflict in the country's east, where an M23 offensive seized Goma, with connectivity disrupted amid the fighting.

Egypt re-arrested journalist Ismail Alexandrani in September 2025 and charged him with spreading false news and promoting terrorism over social media posts, after he had already served seven years. Egypt remains one of the world's top jailers of journalists.

Egyptian authorities arrested at least ten young women with large TikTok and Instagram followings and prosecuted them under the 2018 cybercrime law for violating family principles and values. Haneen Hossam and Mawada al-Adham, two of the best known, were sentenced in June 2021 to 10 and 6 years respectively on human-trafficking and morality charges tied to their videos. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty said the videos were innocuous and the prosecutions targeted working-class women, while authorities cast the campaign as protecting public morals.

Patrick Zaki, a Coptic Egyptian graduate student at the University of Bologna and a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, was seized by National Security officers at Cairo airport in February 2020 as he arrived from Italy, interrogated for many hours, and charged with spreading false news and inciting protest over social-media posts and his rights work. He spent about 22 months in pretrial detention before his release in late 2021, was convicted of spreading false news in 2023, and was then pardoned by the president and returned to Italy. Egyptian authorities framed the case as a false-news prosecution; Amnesty International, the European Parliament, and Scholars at Risk called it an arbitrary arrest and described alleged torture in custody.

SIGN A CONFESSION OR STAY IN PRISON. Five Ethiopian journalists jailed since 2023 on terrorism charges over their coverage of unrest in Amhara -- Gobeze Sisay, Meskerem Abera, Genet Asmamaw, Dawit Begashaw and Abay Zewdu -- have been pressed by prison officials to sign letters accepting responsibility for deaths and destruction in the insurgency and promising to quit journalism, CPJ reported on 13 Aug 2026. Their lawyer says they were threatened and separated from other prisoners; all five have refused, calling the letters self-incriminating. Officials present the process as a pardon; CPJ reports that more than 300 detainees were asked to sign and about 30 refused. The charges carry life imprisonment or death. In February 2026 a federal court ruled there was enough evidence to proceed against four of them. Defence hearings are set for 16 Oct (Abay Zewdu) and 19 Nov 2026 (the other four). Not established: which authority ordered the letters, and whether any signatory has actually been released.

Three consecutive days against one outlet. On Saturday 1 August 2026 Yonas Kedir, editor-in-chief of Addis Standard, was seized in Addis Ababa by armed men in civilian clothes, assaulted, and held about 24 hours under interrogation; his home was searched and personal and work equipment taken. Kedir's account, submitted to his publisher's lawyers, says interrogators focused on a question he put to AFRICOM commander General Anderson at a press briefing about Ethiopia's role in the conflict in Sudan, and on the outlet's reporting of a Tigray interim administration statement on renewed fighting in Western Tigray. On 2 August heavily armed security and intelligence personnel entered the offices without process and seized 4K cameras, tripods, microphones, audio and video production equipment, and deliberately damaged studio lighting. On 3 August the landlord of premises the outlet had occupied for 16 years served notice to vacate within three days, saying police had compelled it; publisher JAKENN Publishing PLC has gone to court to challenge the notice as contrary to its lease. This follows the Ethiopian Media Authority's decision of 24 February 2026 revoking Addis Standard's online media registration certificate for alleged repeated breaches of media law and national interests, which the outlet is contesting in court, and the seizure in April 2026 of managing editor Million Beyene, held incommunicado nearly two weeks and released without charge with no public explanation. CPJ's Muthoki Mumo calls it a campaign to dismantle a leading independent newsroom; HRW's Mausi Segun places it in a pattern of arbitrary arrests and revoked accreditations. The authorities have not publicly explained the detention or the raid. RSF ranks Ethiopia 148th of 180 and counts five journalists in detention there.

SIX MONTHS WITHOUT ACCREDITATION FOR A STORY ON SUDAN. On 13 Feb 2026 the Ethiopian Media Authority suspended the licences of three Reuters journalists based in Addis Ababa, after Reuters reported that Ethiopia was hosting a training site for fighters of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces. The government said the reporting violated Ethiopian law and the national interest. The licences were renewed on 28 Aug 2026, ending the suspension -- but only after talks in which the regulator criticised the balance and accuracy of Reuters' coverage. The authority says Reuters agreed to make corrections and adjustments inside the organisation; that is the regulator's account, and Reuters' own position is not established here. The journalists were not named. It fits a year in which the same authority revoked Addis Standard's registration (Feb 2026). Not established: whether any Reuters story was changed.

Ethiopia imposed conflict-related internet shutdowns in 2025, continuing a pattern of cutting access in regions affected by armed conflict and unrest.

Kenyan authorities blocked Telegram during national secondary-school exams for the third year running in 2025. A coalition led by the Bloggers Association of Kenya challenged four shutdowns before the Kenya High Court, seeking a landmark precedent against future blocks.

Prominent activist Fouad Abdelmoumni was sentenced in absentia to six months in prison and a fine over a Facebook post during French President Macron state visit, in which he criticized Moroccan-French relations and alleged government spyware use. Rights groups called it part of an intensifying crackdown.

Mohamed Mounir, the Moroccan rapper known as Gnawi, was arrested in November 2019, days after releasing the song Aacha El Chaab (Long live the people), which criticized the authorities and made a derogatory reference to the King and drew millions of views online. He was charged in Sale, near Rabat, with insulting public officials over a separate video in which he insulted police, and sentenced to one year in prison and a fine. Moroccan police said the arrest had nothing to do with the song, and a government minister called the track provocative and repugnant; Amnesty International called the prosecution an outrageous assault on free expression, and his lawyer said he was punished for the song.

Journalist Zainab Sodiq was released after detention by Nigeria's Department of State Services over drone equipment, prompting calls for security bodies to respect journalists' rights and avoid unnecessary interference. Equipment-based detentions are a quiet growth area: the tools of reporting become the pretext, without any charge about the reporting itself. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Mubarak Bala, president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested in April 2020 over Facebook posts that authorities deemed blasphemous and likely to cause a public disturbance. He was held for over a year before being charged, and in April 2022 a Kano State court convicted him on eighteen counts and sentenced him to 24 years in prison. A court of appeal called the term excessive and cut it to five years in 2024, and he was released in January 2025 and relocated to Germany. Nigerian authorities prosecuted him under public-disturbance and blasphemy provisions; UN experts, Humanists International, and USCIRF called him a prisoner of conscience jailed for peaceful expression of his beliefs.

During disputed October 2025 elections, Tanzanian authorities imposed a multi-day nationwide internet blackout as security forces cracked down on protesters. Citizen journalists recorded killings and shared footage once access returned; Access Now counted at least eight shutdowns in the country in 2025.

ONE YEAR FOR A POST, THEN TERRORISM CHARGES FOR VERIFYING A LEAK. Tunisian journalist Zied el-Heni, founder of Tunisian Press, was arrested on 24 Apr 2026 and on 7 May a Tunis court sentenced him to one year under Article 86 of the Telecommunications Code over a post calling the jailing of Khalifa Guesmi a judicial conspiracy -- Guesmi was later acquitted. Note the law: this is the telecoms code, not Decree-Law 54. While serving that term he has been charged on four terrorism-related counts over a 2023 leaked audio recording involving former Ennahda official Mondher Lounissi; el-Heni has said he contacted people in the recording to verify it was authentic before reporting. His family says the charges carry a possible life sentence. He is due in court on the terrorism case on 25 Sep 2026 and on separate corruption allegations from his municipal council service on 2 Oct. CPJ calls it prosecution of routine journalistic verification. Not established: the specific terrorism provisions and the outcome of any appeal.

ARRESTED ON THE WAY INTO A RADIO STUDIO. Security officers detained Mohamed El Yousfi, editor of the Tunisian investigative site Al-Qatiba, outside the offices of Express FM on 4 Sep 2026 as he prepared to go on air about water policy. He was taken to a police brigade that investigates complex financial crimes and formally placed in custody on 5 Sep. According to the lawyers of Tunisia's journalists' union (SNJT), relayed by the IFJ, questioning centred on his Facebook posts and on his journalism and editorial line. The authorities have not publicly explained the arrest. CPJ counted him on 16 Sep among four journalists then imprisoned in Tunisia, alongside Zied el-Heni, Mourad Zeghidi and Borhen Bsaies. Not established: the formal charge and which law it falls under, and any court date.

FOUR YEARS, AND SHE WAS NEVER TOLD THERE WAS A TRIAL. A Tunisian court convicted journalist Khaoula Boukrim, founder of the independent news site TUMEDIA, in absentia on 26 Feb 2026 in two cases under Decree-Law 54, the 2022 cybercrime decree, giving her two years in each -- four in total. According to CPJ, neither she nor her lawyer was notified of the hearings, and she learned of the verdicts on 8 Jun 2026. She had left for France in December 2025 after learning cases were being prepared. The pressure began earlier: her press accreditation was withdrawn in August 2024 ahead of the presidential election, and she was questioned twice that November over coverage of a 2022 protest. Not established: which posts or articles the charges rest on, the court, and whether she has challenged the judgments.

A court in Nabeul sentenced Saber Ben Chouchane to death over Facebook posts deemed to insult President Kais Saied and threaten state security, convicting him under the penal code and the 2022 cybercrime decree. The sentence, condemned by rights groups as an unprecedented escalation, was later commuted by a presidential pardon.

Since President Kais Saied issued Decree-Law 54 on cybercrime in 2022, Tunisia has used its vague false-news provisions to prosecute journalists, lawyers, and social-media users for online criticism, with rights groups counting dozens detained. In May 2024 the broadcasters Mourad Zghidi and Borhen Bsaies were jailed for a year over commentary and a Facebook post supporting a detained colleague; courts later layered financial charges on top, raising their terms. Authorities say the decree fights false information that harms public safety; CPJ, Amnesty International, and RSF call it a tool to criminalize dissent and dismantle the press freedoms won after 2011.

REMANDED WITHOUT A LAWYER. Remmy Asiteza, who runs the Daily Express news site, was arrested in Kampala on Aug 13, 2026 and charged at Buganda Road court on Aug 17 with publishing 'fake news' and broadcasting without a licence, then sent to Luzira Prison on remand until Sep 9. He had no legal representation. The case follows July reports on alleged corruption in local-government hiring that named the Minister for the Presidency, Milly Babalanda. The licensing charge carries up to two years. Not established: what happened at the Sep 9 hearing, or which law the 'fake news' count rests on.

Days before Uganda's Jan. 15, 2026 election, the government imposed a nationwide internet shutdown and suspended at least seven human-rights, media, and election-monitoring organizations, while security forces beat and arrested opposition supporters and journalists. THE ORDER CAME FROM THE REGULATOR AT 6 P.M. ON JAN 13, two days before the vote. The Uganda Communications Commission told every mobile operator and internet provider to cut social media, browsing, streaming, personal email and messaging, while keeping hospitals, banks, tax systems, utilities and the Electoral Commission portal online -- a shutdown with a whitelist. It cited misinformation, electoral fraud and incitement; it set no end date. General access came back around 11 p.m. on Jan 17 with Facebook and X still blocked; the UCC declared full restoration on Jan 26. Counts of suspended NGOs differ: Human Rights Watch says at least 10 were ordered to stop work on Jan 12, CIVICUS at least seven.

Uganda blocked Facebook two days before its January 2021 election after the platform removed pro-government accounts, and the block has remained in force for years afterward.

Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan academic, feminist, and poet known for what she calls radical rudeness, was prosecuted over a Facebook poem she posted in September 2018 that used crude and insulting language to attack President Yoweri Museveni and his late mother, part of her long-running criticism of his government. Arrested in November 2018, she was convicted in August 2019 of cyber harassment under the Computer Misuse Act and sentenced to eighteen months, though a High Court overturned the conviction in February 2020, finding she had been denied a fair hearing. Ugandan authorities treated the poem as criminal cyber harassment; Amnesty International and PEN say she was punished solely for using provocative language to criticize a public figure, who is legitimately open to such criticism.

ZNBC journalist McPherson Mukuka was imprisoned for two weeks under the Cyber Crimes Act ahead of Zambia's 13 August 2026 general election, on an allegation of recording a private conversation without consent. MISA describes the detention as a tactical instrument that warned the whole sector against departing from state-sanctioned narratives, and says private outlets Diamond TV, Hot FM and News Diggers attempted balanced coverage under the shadow of judicial intimidation. To ask: whether charges remain live and the next court date.

On polling day, 13 August 2026: ZANIS photojournalist Levy Mwale was assaulted and ordered to stop filming by Tonse Alliance supporters at the Olympia Secondary School polling centre while covering presidential candidate Brian Mundubile voting; Real Times journalist Linda Nyondo was ordered by party activists to delete her footage; and Zambezi FM journalist Edna Mupila was harassed by Electoral Commission of Zambia officials after filming their late arrival. MISA condemned the attacks and the failure of security details to protect journalists, and says the selective application of the law lets state agents and party cadres act without consequence. No arrests over these incidents are established. Locations are not given in the source beyond the Olympia polling centre, so all three sit on Lusaka.

Parliament passed the Public Gathering Bill 2026, and President Hakainde Hichilema did not assent to it. Access Now, which had said the bill would further restrict assembly and association through vague and overbroad provisions, commended the decision in its 5 August 2026 letter. A win for the assembly side of the ledger, recorded alongside the losses. MISA separately recommends that the legislature review the Public Order Act and the 2025 cyber laws. Whether the bill will be returned to Parliament in amended form is not established.

Former member of parliament Munir Zulu was sentenced to 18 months in prison with hard labor for a 2023 social-media post claiming the president planned to dissolve parliament and call early elections. Zambia enacted broad Cyber Crimes and Cyber Security Acts in 2025.

Zambia restricted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp on election day 12 August 2021 and the day after. Before the 13 August 2026 vote, the KeepItOn coalition, CPJ and a 26-member group including the Net Rights Coalition wrote to President Hichilema asking that access be kept open. The Ministry of Technology and Science said in June 2026 it would not deliberately restrict the internet during the poll. No nationwide election-day shutdown is reported by MISA's observers, who record instead that the iVerify platform and the National Action Coalition on Information Integrity debunked circulating claims of ballot delays and internet shutdowns. Recorded as a restriction that was threatened and did not occur; this is not an audit of network measurement, and no NetBlocks reading for 13 August 2026 was located for this entry.

STATION CLOSED, OWNER TAKEN. Taliban security forces shut down Rah-e-Farda TV in Kabul on Sep 6, 2026 and took its new owner, Salman Akhlaqi, to an undisclosed location. The closure followed the station's coverage of a Taliban crackdown on a Shia seminary in western Kabul the week before -- reporting on the treatment of a religious minority. Not established: which Taliban body ordered the closure, where Akhlaqi is held or on what basis, and whether the station will be allowed back on air.

In September-October 2025 the Taliban ordered a nationwide internet shutdown, further constraining journalism, humanitarian operations, and access to education, particularly for women and girls.

Marking five years since the Taliban captured Kabul on 15 August 2021, CPJ said on 14 August 2026 that the group has made Afghanistan one of the hardest places in the world to report, with particular effect on women journalists, and called for an end to sweeping restrictions that have cut access to independent information and let a propaganda ecosystem grow. CPJ records that the Taliban barred women journalists from the public broadcaster immediately, beat reporters covering protests, and by 2022 were using arbitrary detention and imprisonment against outlets. Khalid Qaderi, a reporter and producer at Radio Nawruz in Herat, was the first case CPJ documented of a journalist convicted and sentenced for his work after the takeover. Internet and mobile blackouts are part of the pattern. RSF separately counts more than 165 media workers arrested since August 2021, including 25 in 2025, and more than twenty national directives plus provincial decrees aimed at the press.

Azerbaijan's Media Development Agency declared Iran's Sahar TV unwelcome, adding a cross-border broadcast ban to a domestic crackdown in which 24 journalists are detained since 2023. Among them is Sevinj Vagifgizi, sentenced in mid-2025 on financial-crime charges tied to alleged Western donor funding after authorities searched her outlet's Baku offices; she and colleagues say the charges answered their investigations into official corruption. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

THE NEWEST ADOPTER, AND THE MOST EXPLICIT ABOUT WHAT IT IS FOR. Azerbaijan amended its Criminal Procedures Code in DECEMBER 2023 to permit in-absentia criminal proceedings FOR THE FIRST TIME. Human Rights Watch reviewed eight verdicts handed down by the Baku Courts for Serious Crimes between July 2025 and March 2026, convicting Azerbaijanis living in Europe and the United States and sentencing them to between SIX AND SIXTEEN YEARS. The proceedings leaned heavily on opinions from government-appointed forensic experts, and the defendants were represented by state-appointed lawyers who had no contact with them at all -- the same structural defect documented in Belarus. WHAT THE CONVICTIONS ARE ACTUALLY FOR, per HRW: they turn ONLINE SPEECH into criminal convictions that can then serve as the basis for extradition requests, for detention while travelling internationally, and for seizing assets. That sequence is the point. A sentence that cannot be served becomes a document other states may act on, which is why a conviction in Baku is a practical problem in a European airport. RSF records Azerbaijan as only beginning to use the tactic against journalists, with the first such cases in spring 2025, so the eight verdicts HRW examined cover critics broadly rather than journalists alone. NOT ESTABLISHED: how many of the eight involve media workers.

On 20 June 2025 a Baku court sentenced seven journalists from the independent investigative website Abzas Media and Radio Free Europe to prison terms of seven and a half to nine years on currency-smuggling and money-laundering charges. The outlet was known for online investigations into corruption around President Ilham Aliyev's family, and rights groups say the economic charges were fabricated in retaliation for that reporting, part of a wider sweep that has jailed around two dozen Azerbaijani journalists since late 2023. Authorities maintain the cases are ordinary financial crimes; Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders call them a political effort to silence independent journalism.

Azerbaijan nearly doubled its jailed-journalist count to 24 in a months-long crackdown on independent media that began after its 2023 recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh, using anti-state charges and foreign-funding laws to silence critics.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and one of the country's best-known activists, was prosecuted over 2015 tweets and retweets that criticized civilian deaths in the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen and alleged torture at Bahrain's Jaw prison. Re-arrested in 2016 and held for months in solitary confinement, he was sentenced in February 2018 to five years for spreading false rumours in time of war and insulting public authorities, on top of an earlier term for television interviews; he was released in 2020 under an alternative-sentencing law. Bahraini courts treated his posts as false rumours that harmed the state; Amnesty International, which calls him a prisoner of conscience, and other groups say he was jailed solely for peaceful online expression.

Mushtaq Ahmed, a writer and blogger, was arrested in May 2020 under Bangladesh's Digital Security Act over Facebook posts criticizing the government's COVID-19 response, accused of spreading rumours and undermining the state. He was repeatedly denied bail and held for about nine months without trial, and he died in custody at Kashimpur Jail in February 2021. A co-accused cartoonist, Ahmed Kabir Kishore, said he was tortured in detention. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and rights groups called the act ill-defined and used to punish criticism, and urged its suspension; Bangladesh repealed the Digital Security Act in 2023, replacing it with a Cyber Security Act.

Chao Veasna, an official of the opposition Candlelight Party, was sentenced to three years in prison and fined for incitement after posting a photo of his spoiled election ballot on Facebook ahead of the 2023 general election.

THREE YEARS FOR SCULPTURES MADE MORE THAN A DECADE AGO. On 25 Aug 2026 the Sanhe City People's Court in Hebei sentenced the artist Gao Zhen, 70, one half of the Gao Brothers, to three years in prison for infringing the reputation and honour of heroes and martyrs, over satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong. Amnesty International says three years is the maximum for the offence. He had been detained since August 2024, so the term runs to August 2027. Gao is a US permanent resident; his wife and son are barred from leaving China and, according to Amnesty, have been harassed although neither is charged. His health is reported to be poor, including a spinal condition. Amnesty's China director says the long pre-trial detention and conviction are meant to deter others from independent artistic work. Not established: whether he has appealed, and any official Chinese explanation of the case.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer turned citizen journalist, travelled to Wuhan in early 2020 and posted more than a hundred videos and essays on YouTube, WeChat, and X documenting the early COVID-19 outbreak and questioning the official response. She was detained in May 2020 and sentenced that December to four years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble, the first citizen journalist jailed for pandemic reporting in China. Released in May 2024, she was detained again that August over further social-media posts and sentenced to four more years in September 2025. Chinese authorities call the case a matter of judicial sovereignty; Amnesty International, RSF, and the European Commission call it persecution of protected expression.

DEPORTED AT 4 A.M. OVER A EUROPEAN COURT ORDER. Georgia detained Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Sadigov, editor of Azel.tv, on 4 Apr 2026 and put him on the road to Azerbaijan early on 5 Apr after an overnight court hearing that rejected every defence motion. The stated grounds were a social-media insult to a police officer, administrative offences and unspecified security concerns passed on by Azerbaijan. The European Court of Human Rights had ordered Georgia in Feb 2025 not to extradite him; Georgia says an administrative expulsion is not an extradition. In Baku police held him briefly to strike him from a wanted list, and officials then refused him an identity card, saying his military registration had disappeared -- which his wife calls a pretext that locks him out of every state service. Not established: whether new charges follow.

Journalist Mzia Amaglobeli was sentenced to two years in prison in August 2025, convicted on a charge of resisting or using violence against a law enforcement officer. RSF called the trial unfair and pointed to numerous procedural irregularities, and says she is the first woman journalist imprisoned in Georgia since independence on grounds RSF characterises as political. Amaglobeli was a joint winner of that year's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. The prosecution's case, as reflected in the charge, is that the offence was against a police officer rather than about her journalism; RSF's position is that the proceedings were a pretext. Marker at Tbilisi: the source read for this entry does not give the place of arrest, trial or detention, so the coordinates are the capital and not a confirmed site. Her current status is not established.

SEVEN YEARS AND THREE MONTHS FOR ORGANISING A CANDLELIGHT VIGIL. On 11 Sep 2026 Hong Kong's Court of First Instance sentenced Chow Hang-tung to 7 years 3 months, Lee Cheuk-yan to 7 years and Albert Ho (Ho Chun-yan) to 5 years 2 months for incitement to subversion under the national security law, and fined the Hong Kong Alliance itself HK$1.5 million. The Alliance ran the annual 4 June Tiananmen commemoration for three decades; Beijing's ban came in 2020 and the security law weeks later. Lee and Chow pleaded not guilty and were convicted on 21 Aug 2026; Ho pleaded guilty. The court called the conduct premeditated, city-wide in reach, lasting 14 months, and pursued after the law took effect. Chow has been in custody since 2021. France and Germany asked for the defendants' release, and HRW said the case exposes Beijing's fears. Not established: credit for time served, the judges' names, and whether an appeal will be filed. Not to be confused with inc-hk-chow (Chow Kim-ho, a different person). In a message published by Index on Censorship on 21 Aug 2026, the day of the verdict, Chow described being moved to and from court for 75 trial days in handcuffs, leg irons, waist and ankle chains, and said challenging it in court was pointless in a national-security case. No formal complaint or Correctional Services response has been reported. In January 2026 she lost a separate legal challenge to the prison's trousers-only rule for women.

Between July 2023 and July 2025 Hong Kong's national security police issued four rounds of arrest warrants against 34 pro-democracy figures living abroad -- in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand -- with bounties of HK$1 million on organizers and HK$200,000 on others, invoking the national security law's claim of worldwide jurisdiction over speech and association. The July 2025 round, the largest, targeted 19 people for organizing or joining an unofficial 'Hong Kong Parliament' election in exile that drew 15,702 votes; police warned that even assisting the group violates the law. The pressure reaches back home: at least 80 relatives and former associates of the wanted have been arrested or hauled in for interrogation in Hong Kong, with homes and offices raided. The UK, US and Australia condemned the bounties as transnational repression -- a government paying for the capture of its critics for things they said and organized in free countries.

Chow Kim-ho, a 57-year-old former member of the pro-democracy League of Social Democrats, was sentenced in April 2025 to one year in prison for sedition under Hong Kong's 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, known as Article 23. The charge rested on 145 comments he posted across Facebook, Threads, and Instagram calling Beijing a terrorist state and the Hong Kong authorities an authoritarian regime. The government says the law is needed to protect national security after the 2019 protests; Amnesty International, ARTICLE 19, and UN experts say it criminalizes peaceful online expression and leaves residents second-guessing what they write.

India files more legal demands against verified journalists and news outlets on X than any other government: 114 in a single reporting period, ahead of Turkiye at 78, Russia at 55 and Pakistan at 48. Demands were also recorded from Brazil, Qatar, France, Israel, Mexico, Germany, South Korea, Thailand, Colombia, Indonesia, Serbia and the United States. The number of posts by verified journalists and outlets actually withheld rose to 17 from 11 in the previous period. India has been among the heaviest requestors for years and sits alongside Japan, Turkiye, South Korea and Russia at the top of the overall removal tables -- an earlier reporting period recorded 46,648 removal requests from Japan and 9,364 from Turkiye in six months, with compliance running between 68 and 80 percent. The mechanism to understand is country-withheld content: rather than deleting a post globally, the platform makes it invisible inside the requesting country, so speech is geofenced out of existence where it matters while remaining visible to everyone who is not affected. X has used it in 24 countries and withheld content in 13 of them during a single period, adding Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates for the first time. Pinned at New Delhi and marked approximate; these are national totals, not one event.

India has used its counterterrorism law and Information Technology Rules to jail journalists and silence online critics, arresting NewsClick staff on terrorism charges, blocking a BBC documentary by emergency order, and threatening prosecution over a years-old speech.

Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking site Alt News, was arrested by Delhi police in June 2022 over a 2018 tweet that authorities said insulted Hindu religious beliefs. The arrest followed his flagging of an anti-Islam remark by a ruling-party spokesperson, and he spent about a month in jail facing multiple police complaints under provisions on promoting enmity and outraging religious feelings. The Supreme Court granted bail in July 2022, saying the process itself had become the punishment and that a journalist cannot be barred from tweeting. Officials accused him of spreading provocative content; press-freedom and rights groups called the case retaliation for his work exposing hate speech.

Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old climate activist, was picked up by Delhi Police from her family home in Bengaluru in February 2021 over a protest toolkit, a shared online organizing document supporting India's farmers' protests that had been circulated by Greta Thunberg. She was charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy and held in custody; within days a court granted bail, with the judge calling the evidence scanty and sketchy and noting that citizens are the conscience keepers of government. Police said she was a key conspirator who helped spread a document tied to misinformation and unrest; critics and the bail judge said it was a peaceful organizing document and the sedition charge was baseless.

Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan, an environmental activist from Karimunjawa in Indonesia, was sentenced in April 2024 to seven months in prison under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law over Facebook posts protesting pollution from local shrimp farming, which a court said had created unrest in the community. Indonesian authorities have invoked the law's defamation and unrest provisions in hundreds of cases against critics; in 2025 the Constitutional Court, ruling on his petition, narrowed the law so that government bodies and companies can no longer bring its defamation charges and online posts cannot count as public unrest. Rights groups call the law a tool that criminalizes peaceful online criticism.

Iran ranks second in PEN America's Freedom to Write Index, with jailed writers rising from 43 to 53 in a year, a 23 percent increase, as global totals passed 400 for the first time. Parliament passed a bill allowing harsher punishment for espionage and collusion with states deemed hostile, provisions then used to charge writers. Raids targeted writers and translators affiliated with the leftist Samandar Press, and progressive scholars and translators were briefly detained. Jailed dissidents' safety was also threatened by the June 2025 airstrike on Evin Prison. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Iran imposed a nationwide blackout on 8 January 2026, the twelfth day of the protests that began in 2025. Cloudflare measured traffic from Iran at near zero until 21 January, when a little returned and disappeared again within about 24 hours; a similar brief restoration came on 25 January before traffic recovered more strongly from 27 January. Cloudflare records two nationwide shutdowns in Iran in the first quarter of 2026 and calls Q1 unusually severe, alongside the extended blackout in Uganda. Mozilla, drawing on aggregated Firefox telemetry, reported the blackout still in place as of late May 2026. Reports that it ended on 26 May 2026 have not been confirmed against a measurement source for this entry, so the end date is not established. Access Now's 2025 shutdown report states that as of 12 February 2026, under cover of the shutdown, there were 7,002 confirmed killings with more than 11,730 cases still under investigation, citing RFE/RL; that is Access Now's relayed figure, it has not been verified for this record, and it is recorded here because the scale of the claim is the reason the blackout matters. What would settle it: a Cloudflare Radar or IODA reading for late May 2026, and an independent count of the deaths.

Blogger and writer Hossein Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to twelve years after replying with a single dot to a tweet by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a reply that drew far more likes than the original. He was swept up in a wider crackdown on online dissent.

Toomaj Salehi, an Iranian rapper known for protest songs, was arrested in October 2022 after using his music and social media to back the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that followed Mahsa Amini's death in custody. A revolutionary court in Isfahan sentenced him to death for corruption on earth in April 2024; the Supreme Court overturned the sentence that June, and he was released in December 2024 after serving a one-year term. State media branded him a riot leader who promoted violence, while the United Nations, Amnesty International, and more than a hundred artists called the prosecution an attack on free expression.

Iraqi authorities imposed the world's highest number of exam-related internet shutdowns in 2025, with six shutdown instances between May and September that produced dozens of nationwide disruptions plus repeated blackouts limited to the Kurdistan region, ostensibly to stop cheating.

CITIZENSHIP AS THE PENALTY FOR A FILM. On Sep 16, 2026 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would bring a bill to revoke the citizenship of Israelis who 'defame' soldiers abroad, naming as its targets Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli makers of NAZA, a documentary on military conduct drawn from reporting by Sicha Mekomit, +972 Magazine and The Guardian. A companion bill would raise defamation damages. Neither has passed. The culture minister had already threatened revocation and the army chief said military lawyers were studying legal action. The next day protesters gathered outside the filmmakers' family homes and activists broke into Sicha Mekomit's offices. Not established: the bill's text or when the Knesset will take it up.

Ahmad Hassan al-Zoubi, a Jordanian journalist and satirist, was prosecuted over a December 2022 Facebook post criticizing the government's response to fuel-price protests; a lower court gave two months, but on appeal the term was raised to one year for provoking strife, and security forces arrested him in July 2024 to enforce it. Jordan says its cybercrimes law combats fake news, defamation, and threats to societal peace, and that prosecutions follow due process. Rights monitors including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House counter that the law uses vague terms to criminalize ordinary criticism, and that hundreds of activists, journalists, and protesters have been investigated or jailed over posts since late 2023, especially over pro-Palestinian expression.

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, founder of the YouTube-based outlet Prosto Zhurnalistika, was stopped on 3 August 2026 while trying to fly from Astana to Montenegro on holiday with his family. Border guards told him city police had placed him under a travel ban. He described the stop on Facebook. CPJ says the ban is unexplained and comes amid a rise in criminal prosecutions of leading independent journalists in Kazakhstan; CPJ and five other organisations had written to the Kazakh authorities in April 2026. No official justification for the ban is established.

Alnur Ilyashev was convicted of spreading false information during a state of emergency and sentenced to three years of restricted freedom, plus a five-year ban on activism, over Facebook posts criticizing the government COVID-19 response and the ruling party. Rights groups said he had only expressed peaceful opinions.

Lebanon experienced an internet shutdown in 2025 amid the country's overlapping political and economic crises, recorded by Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition.

Graphic artist Fahmi Reza has been arrested and prosecuted repeatedly under Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act for satirical images of Malaysian officials, including a clown depiction of the prime minister. In December 2024 he was detained over a caricature of a state governor and later barred from entering the state of Sabah.

After Myanmar's military seized power in February 2021, the junta broadened Penal Code section 505A to criminalize online criticism of the coup, then used it against journalists, activists, lawyers, and ordinary users. The military published wanted lists of actors, models, and influencers and charged many under the incitement provision, which carries up to three years, for social-media posts backing the protest movement. One independent monitor counted more than 1,300 people detained for criticizing the military or supporting the opposition online in roughly the first eighteen months after the takeover. The junta says it is curbing false news and unrest; Human Rights Watch, PEN America, and press-freedom groups call section 505A a tool to silence peaceful dissent.

On September 4, 2025, Nepal ordered internet providers to block 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and X, for failing to register with the government. The ban ignited youth-led Gen Z protests in which security forces killed at least nineteen people; the government reversed the block within days and the prime minister resigned.

Oman was among the countries that imposed internet shutdowns in 2025, as documented by Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition.

THREE DAYS' REMAND FOR COMMENTING ON AN APPOINTMENT. Islamabad journalist Muhammad Bilal Ghauri, who runs a popular YouTube news channel, was taken from his home office on Sep 6, 2026 -- his family first reported him missing -- and turned up in the custody of the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency. A district court gave the agency three days' physical remand the same day. The case is brought under PECA's 'false information' provision over his posts on X about Maj. Gen. Faisal Naseer's appointment to head coordination at the National Counter Terrorism Authority. It is the same law used against Razi Tahir and summoned against Asad Ali Toor this summer. Not established: whether he has been charged or freed.

Razi Tahir and Muhammad Saif, independent journalists who publish through Tahir's social media channels, were taken from their Islamabad office on 1 August 2026 by men in police uniform and moved to an undisclosed location. Islamabad police have not acknowledged the detention and their whereabouts remained unknown when CPJ published on 5 August. Both had reported on the unrest in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where authorities suspended internet service and restricted the press. Saif is a Kashmiri journalist. Accounts come from a colleague's post and a local journalist who spoke to CPJ anonymously fearing reprisal. Whether they have since been released or charged is not established.

Pakistan's regulator PEMRA upheld a 15-day suspension of Geo News and a 10 million rupee fine over a Muharram programme, and ordered channels to create in-house editorial boards to improve compliance -- regulatory action that outsources censorship into newsrooms themselves. Separately, CPJ called for the release of journalist Syed Farhad Ali Shah, detained without charge under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance after reporting on protests. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Dr Mahrang Baloch, founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee -- a movement against enforced disappearances in Balochistan -- was detained in Quetta on 22 March 2025 under a public-order law. On 22 June 2026 an anti-terrorism court sentenced her and Sibghatullah Shah to life imprisonment after a closed 'faceless' trial held inside the jail. Amnesty International and UN experts called it a violation of fair-trial standards and a criminalisation of peaceful dissent.

On 5 June 2026 authorities suspended all internet and mobile network signals across Pakistan-administered Kashmir until 12 June, ahead of a JKJAAC rally planned for 9 June. Restrictions continued for months: NetBlocks measured severely restricted access for a third consecutive day in June, and Al Jazeera photographed disrupted service in Muzaffarabad on 5 July. Regional elections for 45 seats ran in three phases on 27 July, 2 August and 10 August 2026 under the blackout, with a boycott call and business shutdowns in Muzaffarabad. The ABC reports a ban on foreign journalists reporting from the region. Death tolls are contested and not established: Al Jazeera reported at least 11 killed in Rawalakot on 7 June; Democracy Now reported at least 40 across the protests; the ABC says the full scale is unknown and the JAAC alleges the government undercounts. The UN called on 17 July for impartial investigations into dozens of reported killings. Punjab deployed 14,000 police for polling. To ask: which authority issued the suspension order, under what power, and whether it has been rescinded. RSF (14 Aug 2026) reports the June internet suspension was still only partly lifted in mid-August, and names the paperwork that closed the region to outside reporters: FOREIGN MEDIA FACILITATION GUIDELINES 2026, imposed Aug 4, require foreign correspondents to get a No Objection Certificate to report anywhere outside Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocked Al Jazeera's website on Aug 2. RSF adds that Razi Tahir -- seized with Muhammad Saif on Aug 1 -- had already been arrested under PECA on Jun 23 and bailed on Jul 8, and that the cybercrime agency summoned freelance journalist Asad Ali Toor on Jul 29 under PECA section 26A. Pakistan ranks 153rd of 180 in RSF's 2026 index. Still not established: who signed the suspension order and whether Tahir and Saif are free.

Pakistan restricted access to X from February 2024 around its general election, citing security, after an official admitted vote manipulation. Watchdogs reported the block persisted for over a year before access was restored in May 2025.

Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer in Multan, was arrested in March 2013 and charged under Pakistan's blasphemy laws for allegedly insulting Islam in lectures and on Facebook. After a trial repeatedly delayed across at least seven judges, a court sentenced him to death in December 2019; he has been held in solitary confinement since 2014, and one of his lawyers was murdered in 2014. His appeal has remained unheard years later. Pakistani courts treat the charges as blasphemy under the penal code; Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience and UN experts called the death sentence a travesty with no basis in law or evidence.

Maria Ressa, the Rappler chief executive and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr were convicted of cyber-libel by a Manila court in June 2020 over a 2012 article about a businessman. The case applied the 2012 Cybercrime Prevention Act retroactively, treating a 2014 typo correction as fresh publication, and carried a term of up to about six years. The Court of Appeals upheld and lengthened the sentence in 2022, and an appeal is pending at the Supreme Court. Philippine officials said the case was not politically motivated; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and press-freedom groups called it judicial harassment meant to silence critical reporting.

Qatar recorded an internet shutdown in 2025 in the #KeepItOn coalition's global tracking of disruptions.

Asaad al-Ghamdi, a Saudi teacher, was sentenced to twenty years by the counterterrorism court solely over his peaceful online expression. His brother had earlier been sentenced to death over posts on X and YouTube, and a third brother is a government critic living in exile, in what rights groups called transnational repression.

Manahel al-Otaibi, a Saudi fitness instructor, used Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram to share fitness content and to call for an end to the male guardianship system and the mandatory abaya. Summoned by police over her social-media activity in late 2022, she was charged under the Anti-Cyber Crime Law and, in a secret 2024 hearing before the counter-terrorism Specialized Criminal Court, sentenced to eleven years, later reduced in 2025 to five years and a travel ban; she was forcibly disappeared for months and, her family says, beaten in custody. Saudi authorities classed her posts as terrorist offences; Amnesty International, ALQST, and UN experts say she was jailed solely for peaceful online expression on women's rights.

Saudi fitness influencer Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced to 11 years in prison for her online posts, including calls for women's rights and against the male-guardianship system, part of a wider crackdown handled by the counterterrorism court.

Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University PhD student, was arrested in January 2021 while visiting Saudi Arabia over tweets and retweets supporting women's rights activists. A counterterrorism court first sentenced her to 6 years, then raised it to 34 years on appeal in August 2022, believed to be the longest term imposed on a Saudi woman for online expression. After international pressure the sentence was cut to 27 years and then to 4 years plus 4 suspended, and she was released in December 2024. Rights groups called it part of a wider crackdown on online dissent, while Saudi authorities framed the charges around terrorism and public order.

Saudi PhD student Salma al-Shehab, arrested in 2021 for tweeting and retweeting women's-rights activists, had a six-year sentence raised to 34 years on appeal, the longest known term for a Saudi woman over peaceful online expression. She was released in 2025 after four years.

Saudi mother of five Nourah al-Qahtani was sentenced to 45 years in prison over posts from two anonymous accounts, convicted of using the internet to tear the social fabric, weeks after the al-Shehab ruling.

X received its first Targeted Correction Direction from the Singaporean government under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. The direction was issued on the basis that a post had misquoted a government official's speech out of context. A correction direction is a distinct instrument from a takedown: the content stays up and the state compels the platform to attach an official statement to it, which means the government is not suppressing the speech so much as conscripting the platform into rebutting it. That is worth tracking separately from removal counts, because it does not appear in them. It also sets the threshold low -- the trigger here was quoting an official in a way the state considered decontextualised, which is an ordinary journalistic dispute rather than a factual fabrication. NOTE FOR THE NEXT PASS: Singapore is one of the nine territories with no polygon in world_paths, per HANDOFF section 6.3, so this record will render as a marker and appear in the aggregation but cannot be jurisdiction-checked or tinted. Marked approximate.

In 2018, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sued financial adviser and blogger Leong Sze Hian after Leong shared, without comment, a Malaysian article on Facebook linking Lee to Malaysia's 1MDB financial scandal. Leong removed the post within three days at the government's request, but Lee pressed the defamation suit, and in March 2021 the High Court ordered Leong to pay 133,000 Singapore dollars, finding he had shared the link with reckless disregard for whether it was true. Lee's lawyers called the allegations false and baseless and noted leaders may defend their reputation in court, while the International Commission of Jurists and other critics said penalizing someone for merely sharing a link imposes an exorbitant cost and chills online speech.

Syria continued cutting internet access nationwide during 2025 exam periods, carrying on a practice from the fallen Assad regime, even as the country worked to rebuild its digital infrastructure.

Section 112 of Thailand's Criminal Code punishes defaming, insulting or threatening the King, Queen, Heir-apparent or Regent with three to fifteen years -- per count. Counts stack and there is no cap, so each post is charged separately and the sentence becomes a function of how often someone posted rather than of any harm caused. The Computer Crime Act adds up to five years and a 100,000 baht fine per count on top, and permits courts to order content permanently deleted. The statute does not define insult, does not require proof of harm, and does not turn on the speaker's intent or the context. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights records at least 291 individuals prosecuted in at least 321 cases, within a wider total of at least 4,076 prosecutions for political participation and expression since the Free Youth protests began in July 2020. For scale: between TLHR's founding in 2014 and 2019, 65 people were charged under Section 112. Conviction rates run high -- 83% in the figures submitted to Thailand's Universal Periodic Review, and 79 guilty against 21 acquitted in the 100 first-instance verdicts delivered between Nov 2021 and Oct 2023. At least 20 of those charged were under 18. Two features make it a tool rather than a law: anyone may file a complaint against anyone, and at least 169 of the recorded cases began with a report from a member of the public, some filed tactically in remote provinces so the defendant must travel the length of the country to answer them. Bail is routinely denied both during investigation and pending trial. Activist and lawyer Arnon Nampa was given four years for three Facebook messages and four more in a separate case over a 2020 rally -- prosecuted, in other words, while acting as counsel for others facing the same charge.

In May 2026 Thailand's Supreme Court upheld a six-year sentence under Section 112 against Tiwagon for wearing a shirt stating that he had lost faith in the monarchy. A separate case against Thanathorn was dismissed the same month. No post, no speech, no rally, no audience beyond whoever saw him wearing it: the offence was a sentence printed on a garment, and the final appellate court in the country confirmed six years for it. This record sits at the opposite end of the range from the 50-year and 87-year sentences and is arguably the more useful of the two ends, because it establishes the floor. A statute that reaches a T-shirt has no meaningful outer boundary, which is what makes the online cases in this dataset predictable rather than surprising. Placed at Bangkok for the Supreme Court and marked approximate; the sources do not give the location of the original offence.

Mongkol Thirakot, an online clothes vendor from Chiang Rai, was sentenced in 2023 to 28 years over Facebook posts deemed insulting to the king, and in January 2024 an appeal court raised the total to about 50 years, the heaviest term recorded under Thailand's lese-majeste law (Section 112), which treats each post as a separate offense and carries 3 to 15 years per count. Human-rights lawyer Arnon Nampa has likewise drawn cumulative decades over Facebook posts and speeches, and Thai Lawyers for Human Rights counts more than 270 people charged under the law since 2020. Authorities say it protects the monarchy, while UN experts and rights groups call the sentences grossly disproportionate.

Mongkol Thirakot, known as Busbas, a man from Chiang Rai, faces 50 years in prison for royal defamation. The figure was confirmed on 18 Jan 2024 after the Court of Appeal found him guilty on ADDITIONAL counts beyond those he had already been sentenced for -- so appealing produced a longer sentence, not a shorter one. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights identified it as the longest sentence on record under Section 112, surpassing the 43 years Anchan Preelert served after her reduction. The court treated each post as a separate offence and totalled the penalties, which converts what would elsewhere be political speech into a term stretching past half a lifetime. It landed the day after the Criminal Court gave activist lawyer Arnon Nampa four years over three Facebook messages, which is a useful pairing: the same statute, the same week, sentences an order of magnitude apart, and no principle in the text that explains the difference.

Anchan Preelert, a former senior official at Thailand's Revenue Department, was convicted in Jan 2021 under Section 112 and the Computer Crime Act over posts on multiple social media accounts held to defame the monarch. She was sentenced to 87 years. The term was cut to 43 because she confessed -- so the confession discount was itself measured in decades. It stood as the longest recorded sentence under the law until 2024. Nothing about the arithmetic is exotic: each post was a separate count, each count carried three to fifteen years, and the counts were added together. This is what a per-count statute with no cumulative ceiling produces when applied to someone who posted often, and it is the reason the sentence figures in these records are not typographical errors.

EMPLOYMENT AS EVIDENCE. Police raided the Istanbul offices of the Etkin News Agency (ETHA) on 3 Feb 2026, and on 5 Feb editors Nadiye Gurbuz and Pinar Gayip and reporter Elif Bayburt were jailed pending trial on charges of membership of the MLKP, a left-wing group Turkiye lists as terrorist. According to CPJ's review of the indictments, the case against them rests on their working for ETHA and attending certain public events. All three deny membership. Gayip and Bayburt have since been released pending trial; Gurbuz is still in prison more than seven months later, the court saying not all witnesses have been heard. Trials are set for 7 Dec (Gayip), 8 Dec (Gurbuz) and 10 Dec 2026 (Bayburt). The Istanbul chief prosecutor's office did not answer CPJ. Not established: which court is hearing the cases.

AN LGBTQ+ NEWS SITE TREATED AS OBSCENITY. In an operation police code-named 'My Family is Safe', Turkish courts blocked the websites of Kaos GL, the country's largest LGBTQ+ rights group and news outlet, and jailed seven of its board members on obscenity charges. Journalist Tugba Tekerek, a Kaos GL contributor, was detained in Istanbul on Sep 13, 2026 and arrested in Ankara on Sep 15 pending trial -- over an article about elections in Georgia written two years earlier. CPJ counts at least 54 people jailed in other provinces and more than 126 detained at protests in Ankara and Istanbul, among them two reporters covering them. Not established: a trial date, or which content in the Georgia article is alleged to be obscene.

ARRESTED FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER THE STORY. Istanbul police detained former Dogan News Agency reporter Selahattin Gunday on 10 Sep 2026 and a court jailed him pending trial on 12 Sep, over footage and reporting from 2011 of intelligence operative Kasif Kozinoglu arriving at court after his arrest. The charges are revealing the identity of an intelligence officer and unlawfully obtaining personal data. His camera operator from that assignment, Idris Tiftikci, was detained the same day and released pending trial. The case sits inside a reopened investigation into Kozinoglu's death in prison in 2011. The agency Gunday worked for has since closed. His lawyer has objected to the detention. Not established: whether the objection succeeded, and when or whether an indictment will be filed.

HANDED OVER, THEN JAILED ON A FILE HIS LAWYER CANNOT SEE. Syrian government forces captured Kurdish journalist Ahmet Polad (legal name Mehmet Nizam Aslan), who reported for the Etkin News Agency and Ozgur TV, in Raqqa on 18 Jan 2026. After nearly eight months in Syrian custody he was transferred to Turkiye on 8 Sep 2026, and an Istanbul court ordered his arrest on 11 Sep. The charges are not public: his lawyer told CPJ the case file is restricted and she has not been shown the warrant. She says he was beaten daily in Syria and kept in a cell too low to stand up in, and that his health is now very poor. Turkiye's Justice Ministry did not respond to CPJ. Not established: what he is accused of, and under what procedure Syria handed him to Turkiye.

JAILED FOR DISCUSSING THE GROUP SHE CALLS TERRORIST. Turkish police searched the Ankara home of YouTube journalist Oya Lale Arslan on Sep 4, 2026, seized her devices and detained her; a court ordered her held pending trial the same day for 'publicly spreading disinformation' and terrorist propaganda. The case concerns broadcasts about FETO, the movement Ankara blames for the 2016 coup attempt -- and Arslan told interrogators she regards it as a terrorist group and would not promote it. She has about 151,000 YouTube followers. CPJ reported at least one other journalist arrested on disinformation suspicion the same week. Not established: which broadcasts are cited or when she will be tried.

JAILED OVER A HEADLINE. On 29 Aug 2026 a court in Aydin remanded Irem Delice, a reporter for the local Aydin Denge newspaper, over a social media post headlined 'Erdogan has died' -- a death notice for a local woman whose surname was Erdogan. The charge is publicly spreading misleading information -- the offence title used in Turkiye's 2022 disinformation law. A criminal judgeship of peace first released her under judicial control; the prosecutor objected and she was then jailed pending trial. The post was a misleading headline on a local death notice; the response was pre-trial detention of the reporter. Not established: whether she remains in custody, whether an indictment has been filed, and a trial date.

Ahead of and during the NATO summit held in Ankara on July 7 and 8, 2026, Turkish authorities detained more than 200 people, journalists among them, and extended bans on demonstrations. Human Rights Watch and press-freedom organisations described it as a crackdown that further narrowed independent reporting and public scrutiny at precisely the moment international attention was on the country. The pattern is familiar from the Imamoglu arrest already on this map: the restriction is timed to an event, framed as security, and lifted late enough that the coverage never happens.

At least 11 members of the press were taken into police custody in Turkiye between 23 June and 7 July 2026 ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara. Three were still held when CPJ published on 8 July, two of them under arrest. Berfin Ay, an editor at the Kurdish-language daily Azadiya Welat, was held from 5 to 7 July at a border point in Sirnak province on what CPJ describes as a false tip about a theft and an expired travel ban. Kayhan Ayhan, a court reporter for BirGun who has covered the trials of jailed Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was taken from his home and questioned on suspicion of publicly spreading disinformation, then released on 7 July. Hazar Dost of the investigative platform Ortak was detained on 6 July over testimony he gave in 2018 and released the next day; he said he was mistreated in custody. This is the press-detention side of the pre-summit sweep and is separate from the street clearances already recorded.

Article 299 of Turkey's penal code makes insulting the president a crime punishable by one to four years, raised by a sixth when done publicly or online. Prosecutions surged after Erdogan became president in 2014: filings under Articles 299 and 301 rose from about 44,700 in 2020 to roughly 59,800 in 2025, and in 2025 alone 207 minors were convicted. Cases routinely stem from tweets, Instagram posts, and cartoons. Former Miss Turkey Merve Buyuksarac received a suspended term over a satirical Instagram poem, and opposition figures have been charged over social-media posts. The government says the law protects the office of the presidency, while HRW, RSF, and the European Court of Human Rights call it incompatible with free expression.

When police detained Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu -- Erdogan's leading rival for the presidency -- on March 19, 2025, the speech crackdown moved faster than the protests. Within a day authorities had detained 37 people over 'provocative' social media posts about the arrest; within a week the BTK communications regulator and the courts had ordered more than 700 X accounts blocked, sweeping in journalists, media outlets, student groups, women's organizations, and the Progressive Lawyers' Association, which said it was targeted for documenting police violence at the demonstrations and that account owners never even received the court decisions to contest. Bandwidth throttling slowed social platforms nationwide during Turkey's largest protests in a decade. Then in May a court blocked the X account of Imamoglu himself -- nearly 10 million followers -- for the duration of his pre-trial detention; X complied while calling the order disproportionate and challenging it, and the opposition CHP called it the digital pillar of the coup: a jailed presidential candidate barred from speaking to voters at all.

Turkey, with a decades-long record of jailing journalists, held eight in prison and continues to prosecute people for online posts under broad insult and anti-state laws, including charges of insulting the president.

Turkish authorities blocked Instagram nationwide for about nine days in August 2024 amid political unrest, citing misinformation, part of a long pattern of throttling and blocking platforms during sensitive periods.

Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati engineer, poet, and the country's most prominent human rights defender, was taken from his home in Ajman in a pre-dawn raid in March 2017, with security officers searching the house and seizing the family's phones and laptops. He was charged under the 2012 cybercrime law with using Twitter and Facebook to publish false information that harmed the country's reputation and social harmony, and in 2018 was sentenced to ten years and a heavy fine, then held largely in solitary confinement; a 2024 mass trial added a fifteen-year term. UAE authorities framed his posts as spreading false news against the state; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN experts, and the EU call him a prisoner of conscience jailed solely for peaceful expression.

Since late June 2026 Hanoi police have arrested five people -- writers, editors, and promoters -- over a controversial book about Ho Chi Minh, charging all five with anti-state propaganda under penal code article 117, the national-security statute that anchors most speech prosecutions in Vietnam. Among them is Tran Viet Anh, founder of Spiderum, an online discussion platform popular with young Vietnamese whose YouTube channel counts 1.19 million subscribers; the platform has been suspended. A history book, a publisher, and a discussion forum: the arrest list is a tidy inventory of what article 117 reaches.

Vietnam prosecutes speech under two articles of the penal code. Article 117 covers making, storing, disseminating or propagandising information, materials and products aimed at opposing the State, and carries up to 20 years. Article 331 covers abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state, and carries up to seven years. Neither defines its terms. In Opinion No. 51/2024 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Article 117 so overly broad and so lacking in definition that it prevents anyone from regulating their own conduct to stay within the law -- a trap for critics rather than a rule. Between 2018 and Feb 2025 courts convicted and sentenced at least 124 people under Article 331, against 28 in the preceding six years under its predecessor provision. In 2025 alone at least 32 more were sentenced under Article 331, including blogger Truong Huy San and the prominent lawyer Tran Dinh Trien. Human Rights Watch counted more than 160 political prisoners held during 2025 and at least 40 further arrests for criticising the government. The reach is the point: Article 331 is not reserved for prominent dissidents. HRW documents Dao Ba Cuong, an iron worker from Phu Yen province who staged protests inside his own house after his son died in police custody, arrested in Apr 2023 and sentenced to two years. In Sept 2025 political prisoner Vuong Van Tha died in unclear circumstances while serving 12 years for criticising the authorities.

In the weeks before Vietnam's 14th Communist Party Congress, due to open on 19 Jan 2026, the government escalated arrests of perceived critics. Hanoi police arrested blogger Hoang Thi Hong Thai on 7 Jan 2026 over comments she had made on social media criticising the government, which had drawn thousands of views. In late Dec 2025, courts convened trials at short notice and convicted five journalists and dissidents under Article 117, handing down lengthy prison terms -- including two defendants tried in absentia who were already in exile abroad. Also in Sept 2025, a court convicted Trinh Ba Phuong, who was already serving ten years, and added a further sentence. The pattern is worth naming because it recurs wherever a one-party state faces a scheduled political milestone: arrests cluster in the weeks before the event, trials are convened quickly, and sentences land while attention is on the Congress itself. Trying exiles in absentia extends the reach beyond the border, since a conviction follows the person even where the prison cannot.

Trinh Ba Phuong was already serving a ten-year sentence at An Diem Prison in Quang Nam province when, in May 2025, wardens searched his cell and found a document he had written denouncing communism and describing the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. He was charged under Article 117 for anti-state propaganda on the strength of it. In Sept 2025 a court convicted him and added a further sentence to the one he was already serving. This is the narrowest speech case in the dataset and the most revealing. There was no audience: nothing was posted, published, distributed or shown to anyone. A prisoner wrote down what he thought about the government and about the prison holding him, in the only place available to him, and the writing itself was the offence. It also opens a vein neither speech map had touched -- retaliation against people already in custody, who are the least able to document what happens to them and the least likely to be believed about it. Placed at the provincial capital of Quang Nam and marked approximate; the prison's exact location is not given in the sources.

Vietnam held at least 16 journalists in prison amid deepening repression, routinely jailing bloggers and online commentators under vague anti-state and propaganda provisions for posts critical of the one-party state.

On 26 Aug 2024 the People's Court of Ha Tinh Province sentenced Phan Dinh Sang, 57, of Huong Khe District, to six years in prison plus two years of probation under Article 117. According to the provincial procuracy he had, between 2016 and 2023, created and run five Facebook accounts used to bring together opposition groups online, and had posted and shared material said to distort history and slander the authorities -- conduct the state attributed to his dissatisfaction with the government. He is not an activist leader, a journalist or an organiser. He is a private citizen who posted for seven years and received six. Recorded because the aggregate figures in the machinery record are made of cases like this one, and a map of only prominent dissidents would misrepresent who these statutes actually reach. In the same period Vietnamese courts used Article 331 against Le Phu Tuan, 52, of Tuyen Quang province, sentenced to four years and eight months over 21 videos and livestreams posted to Facebook across four months.

Nguyen Lan Thang, a Hanoi engineer and blogger who contributed to Radio Free Asia, was arrested in July 2022 and sentenced in April 2023 to six years in prison plus two years probation under Article 117, which criminalizes making or spreading material against the state. Prosecutors said he posted about a dozen anti-state videos on Facebook and YouTube, gave interviews to foreign media, and kept banned books; he was tried in a closed session with only his wife and lawyers admitted. Vietnam treats Article 117 as a national-security measure protecting the one-party state, while Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, RSF, and the International Commission of Jurists call it a catch-all used to jail peaceful critics and say Thang only exercised free speech.

Pham Doan Trang, a Vietnamese writer, journalist, and democracy activist who co-founded the independent outlets Luat Khoa and The Vietnamese, was arrested in October 2020 and sentenced by a Hanoi court in December 2021 to nine years in prison for anti-state propaganda under Articles 88 and 117 of the penal code. The indictment cited her writings and interviews with foreign media; an appeal was rejected in 2022. She had won the RSF Press Freedom Prize and a CPJ press-freedom award. Vietnamese authorities treat such work as activity opposing the state; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, RSF, CPJ, and PEN International call her imprisonment arbitrary and an attack on free expression.

Freelance journalist Aziz Al-Ahmadi was given a four-month suspended sentence by a court in Shabwa province after a Facebook post questioning a local solar-energy land deal and criticizing power outages. Prosecutors accused him of spreading false information and inciting regional divisions.

Collective Shout, an activist group based in Taylors Lakes, Victoria, published an open letter alleging that Steam and itch.io hosted games depicting rape, incest and child sexual abuse, and lobbied Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe to stop processing transactions for the storefronts until such titles were removed. Roughly a week later Steam removed hundreds of games; itch.io de-indexed its whole adult catalogue. Reporting puts the campaign's volume at 1,067 emails to payment processors -- which is the number worth remembering, because it is the price of removing tens of thousands of works from sale in every country at once. The group has run comparable campaigns for about a decade, previously targeting mainstream titles over their depictions of sex workers and of child abuse. Two features make this a censorship record rather than a consumer campaign. First, the leverage is financial rather than legal, so the works were not judged unlawful anywhere and no forum existed in which to defend them. Second, jurisdiction becomes irrelevant: an organisation in one country, addressing card networks in another, determined what buyers everywhere else could purchase. Whether the underlying complaint about specific games had merit is a separate question from whether four private companies should be the body that decides it.

Papua New Guinea recorded an internet shutdown in 2025 in the #KeepItOn coalition's global tracking of disruptions.

Angolan authorities restricted internet access during July 2025 protests, a measure that local civil-society groups condemned as dictatorial.

Since seizing power in 2022, Burkina Faso's junta under Captain Ibrahim Traore has banned more than a dozen foreign outlets, including RFI, France 24, the BBC, and Voice of America, often after they reported on alleged army massacres. Critical local journalists have been suspended, abducted, or forcibly conscripted into the fight against jihadists, and several disappeared in 2024.

George Atabong Lekeaka has been held incommunicado since 10 August 2026 after publishing a photo of security officers on patrol during clashes with separatist fighters. CPJ says he has had no access to a lawyer or his family and called on authorities to disclose his whereabouts and release him. The Anglophone crisis began in 2016 with protests by lawyers and teachers in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions. Marker placed at Bamenda, the Northwest regional capital: the place of detention has not been disclosed, so the coordinates locate the region covered, not a confirmed site. No charge is established.

Following a disputed presidential election in October 2025, an internet blackout deepened tensions in Cameroon as authorities sought to curb protests and dissent; the disruption also caused downstream outages in the neighboring Central African Republic.

The Central African Republic was hit by a 2025 internet disruption that originated as a cross-border shutdown imposed from neighboring Cameroon, recorded by the #KeepItOn coalition.

Chad was among the countries where authorities cut low-earth-orbit satellite internet service in 2025, a tactic increasingly used to sever connectivity that bypasses traditional networks.

Equatorial Guinea blocked internet access during 2025 protests and was among a small group of countries where authorities cut low-earth-orbit satellite service to extend the shutdown.

On the evening of 17 February 2026 the High Authority for Communication, Gabon's media regulator, announced on television the immediate suspension of social media platforms until further notice. Spokesperson Jean-Claude Mendome cited the spread of false information, cyberbullying and unauthorised disclosure of personal data, and said content was undermining human dignity, public morality, the honour of citizens, social cohesion, the stability of institutions and national security; the regulator added that free expression must be exercised within the law. OONI measurements confirm blocking of WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube from 18 February. NetBlocks reported most providers blocking, with Gabon Telecom, the largest operator, allowing very limited access. The block came during cost-of-living protests and teacher and civil-servant strikes running since December 2025, under President Brice Oligui Nguema, who took power in a 2023 coup and won the presidency in 2025; the government also suspended taxes and duties on some foodstuffs and building materials for six months in response to the protests. Circumvention was immediate: Proton VPN reported sign-ups from Gabon up about 60,000 percent by 19 February, a vendor's own figure. Paradigm Initiative put the economic cost of two days at about 2.96 million US dollars, calculated with the NetBlocks cost tool -- a model, not measured losses. The KeepItOn coalition, Paradigm Initiative and the Internet Society's Gabon chapter called for restoration. The regulator gave no timeline and published no specific evidence of the violations it cited. Gabon had no record on this map before. When or whether access was restored is not established; what would settle it is an OONI or NetBlocks reading after February 2026.

Internet Society Pulse recorded 11 shutdowns ongoing as of 18 August 2026, and 75 total or partial shutdowns across 10 countries in the 12 months from August 2025, costing 18,685 hours of access. Pulse's longer series, published 6 August 2026 after an audit with the VEsinFiltro team at Conexion Segura y Libre, counts 916 shutdown events across 61 countries from 2019 to 2025: 70.8 percent lasted a day or less, 95.4 percent ended within 30 days, Asia and Africa account for the most events, and India alone accounts for nearly one in two. Separately UNESCO counted at least 300 shutdowns in more than 54 countries over two years. These are counts by monitoring groups using differing definitions, not a single audited register. Marker placed at the Internet Society's Reston, Virginia base; the figures are global.

RSF reported on 8 July 2026 that the legal indicator in its World Press Freedom Index deteriorated in more than 60 percent of countries between 2025 and 2026, and argues that national-security legislation, emergency powers and ordinary statutes are increasingly used to bypass press law. RSF's live counters, read on 20 August 2026, showed 22 journalists killed since 1 January 2026 and 436 journalists plus 36 media workers detained. Cases RSF cites span democracies and authoritarian states alike: a French Disclose journalist held 39 hours in 2023 and placed under surveillance, whose case an investigating judge dismissed in October 2025 as clearly in the public interest, with the prosecution now seeking to reopen it and to have the articles and an accompanying documentary removed; Russia adding the outlet Crimean Solidarity to its foreign agents list; and the US Department of Justice subpoenaing Washington Post journalists. These are RSF's counts and RSF's framing, from an organisation Russia has designated undesirable, and they are a floor rather than an audited total. This record covers the legal-indicator finding and the detention counters and is separate from the Index ranking record already on this map. Marker at RSF's Paris base; the figures are global.

The aggregate picture behind the individual cases on this map. Reporters Without Borders' 25th World Press Freedom Index, published in 2026, found scores DECLINED in 100 of 180 countries and territories. China remains 178th and holds the most jailed journalists in the world at 121. Russia ranks just behind on incarcerations, with nearly 70 exiled journalists targeted by arrest or conviction in absentia over three years, 30 of those in a single year. Parallel counts from other monitors: the Committee to Protect Journalists puts roughly 330 journalists behind bars worldwide for their work; RSF's annual round-up recorded 67 reporters killed, 503 detained, 135 missing and 20 held hostage; PEN America's Freedom to Write Index passed 400 jailed writers for the first time, with Iran second overall and rising 23 percent year on year. Two structural findings matter more than the rankings. First, the pressure has shifted from raw arrests toward LEGAL instruments -- prosecutions, licensing and regulatory action, foreign-agent statutes and digital controls -- which is harder to count and easier to defend as ordinary law enforcement; El Salvador fell 8 places on the strength of a foreign-agents law pushing journalists into exile. Second, decline is not confined to authoritarian states: several EU members remain in breach of the European Media Freedom Act despite it being in force, and Estonia slipped on political pressure alone. Ukraine is among the deadliest countries for media workers, with RSF reporting Russian forces targeting reporters directly.

Access Now and the KeepItOn coalition, publishing on 31 March 2026, counted at least 313 internet shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, continuing a rise since 2023. India recorded 65, its lowest since 2017 but still the highest of any democracy and second highest of any country. Eastern Europe and Central Asia saw 29 shutdowns across seven countries; Latin America and the Caribbean five across two, Venezuela and Panama. Access Now notes the International Criminal Court has linked shutdowns to crimes against humanity on the reasoning that they help perpetrators evade accountability, and singles out India as the case where orders are lawfully published and still incompatible with democratic practice. This count is not the same as the Internet Society Pulse count recorded separately on this map: the two use different definitions of a shutdown event and should not be added together or treated as corroborating each other. Access Now's count is a floor, covering only shutdowns the coalition could verify. Marker at Access Now's New York base; the figures are global.

CPJ's annual prison census recorded more than 300 journalists imprisoned worldwide as of the end of 2025, the fifth consecutive year above that level. CPJ attributes the run of record numbers to growing authoritarianism and to more armed conflicts. The census is a snapshot taken on 1 December each year and counts only those CPJ can confirm are held in relation to their work, so it is a floor rather than a total. Marker placed at CPJ's New York base; the figure is global.

A WORD FOR HOW HE TOOK POWER IS NOW A BROADCAST OFFENCE. Guinea's media regulator, the High Authority of Communication, suspended France 24 on Sep 17, 2026 because a presenter called President Mamadi Doumbouya a 'putschist' -- he took power in a 2021 coup before winning the December 2025 election. The regulator said the channel ignored its order to stop using terms it considers an affront to the head of state's dignity. A day earlier it withdrew the accreditation of Jeune Afrique correspondent Diawo Barry for reporting it called unbalanced. No end date was set for either measure. Not established: how long the ban lasts and whether it reaches France 24's online output.

Guinea's military government disrupted internet access around its September 2025 constitutional referendum, joining a run of election-related shutdowns across the continent.

Guinea-Bissau restricted internet access around its contested November 2025 elections and the political turmoil that followed, recorded by the #KeepItOn coalition.

Libyan authorities restricted internet access during 2025 protests and the accompanying security crackdowns, part of a wider pattern of shutdowns tied to the country's political instability.

Mali's cybercrime law is being used to prosecute journalists. On 23 March 2026 the national centre for combating cybercrime sentenced Youssouf Sissoko, director of the newspaper L'Alternance, to two years in prison and a fine of one million CFA francs, about 1,525 euros, over an opinion article critical of Niger's head of state General Abdourahamane Tiani. BOTH JOURNALISTS ARRESTED IN JUNE 2026 WERE CONVICTED. Chahana Takiou of 22 Septembre was sentenced on 3 August 2026 to one year, six months of it to serve. Abdrahamane (Abdramane) Keita of Le Temoin was sentenced on 14 September 2026 by the national cybercrime unit to two years, all to serve, and fined one million CFA francs (about 1,500 euros) on 'regionalist' and false-information charges, over TV comments that the northern town of Kidal was administered by the jihadist group JNIM. Prosecutors had sought three years. SOURCING: RSF only for the verdicts. In November 2025 the same law was used to detain Boubacar Traore, director of the newspaper L'Empire, after a defamation suit by the owner of the company Petro-Bama over an article about an alleged land dispute. RSF reports these alongside the suspension of a phone-in programme and the silencing of international broadcasters across nearly six years of military transition. RSF notes the cybercrime law remains contested within the profession itself. No government justification for the individual prosecutions is recorded in the source read for this entry. Marker at Bamako; the source does not give the location of each proceeding. To ask: whether either man has appealed.

Mali's military government cut local broadcasting of RFI and France 24 in 2022 and has suspended domestic outlets such as Joliba TV, while pro-junta influencers issue threats against independent journalists. The Maison de la Presse in Bamako was ransacked in 2023, and reporters have been deported or detained as the junta tightened control over coverage of the security crisis.

After seizing power in July 2023, Niger's military government suspended RFI and France 24, banned the BBC in December 2024, and detained local journalists. In 2024 it strengthened a law criminalizing the online spread of information judged likely to disturb public order, part of a coordinated press crackdown across the Alliance of Sahel States with Mali and Burkina Faso.

ARRESTED FOR WHO SHE WORKS FOR. Israeli forces detained Naqaa Hamed, a US citizen and Palestinian journalist who reports for Iran's Press TV and Turkey's TRT, at the Tuqu checkpoint near Bethlehem on Sep 15, 2026, as she returned from covering the siege of Qusra village. Police say she is being investigated for trading with the enemy, incitement and support for Iran; military sources pointed to her work for the Iranian broadcaster as the basis. A military court in Salem extended her detention to Sep 23. Online campaigns had called for her arrest beforehand. Not established: whether she has been charged, and what the US government has done for a detained citizen.

The National Union of Somali Journalists demanded the immediate release of journalist Suways Ahmed, calling her arrest in Puntland politically motivated and urging respect for media freedom. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

South Sudan cut internet access during 2025 protests and political unrest, one of several African shutdowns imposed that year to curb dissent.

Alrayah Isam Gaksa, a contributor to the news site Hekaiyat and to Baankhi Press, was stopped at the entrance to Wad Madani on 2 August 2026 by the Sudan Shield Forces, an armed group operating within the Sudanese Armed Forces-aligned coalition and led by commander Abu Aqla Keikel, as he returned from covering activities at Al-Jazirah University's Faculty of Education. The account is from a statement by the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate. In a statement on 4 August the Sudan Shield Forces denied arresting a journalist but acknowledged detaining an individual wanted over other allegations. CPJ called for his release. His whereabouts and status are not established.

Amid a devastating civil war, Sudan shut down mobile internet nationwide in July 2025 during part of the exam period, compounding dangers for civilians, on top of a prolonged WhatsApp block that Access Now and partners campaigned to lift.

After anti-constitution protests broke out in June 2025, Togolese authorities blocked DuckDuckGo, Facebook, Signal, Telegram, and YouTube and throttled the internet daily from 9am to midnight between July and September. Rights groups reported seven killed and dozens arrested in the crackdown.

Turkmenistan, one of the world's most closed information environments, again restricted connectivity in 2025, blocking platforms and foreign sites as documented by the #KeepItOn coalition.