PEN America

IFEX joins over 180 groups and individuals in urging member states to recognise the critical role of migrant artists in advancing human rights, and to provide accessible asylum policies, comprehensive protection programs and proactive, inclusive cultural policies.

“We urge the international community to support all Ukrainian efforts to investigate these crimes and ensure that the deliberate targeting of Ukrainian cultural heritage by the Russian regime is included in national accountability mechanisms as well as the international commission of inquiry for Ukraine.”

While efforts to remove books have been intensifying for the past year, what’s happening now is that new laws passed last year in Florida are having a clear chilling effect on classroom teachers and librarians.

“Culture – past, present, and future – is on the front lines of the brutal war on Ukraine and cultural erasure is a central tactic of Russia’s campaign of aggression and violence in Ukraine, which has gone on for over eight years.”

The report, “Connecting the Dots: Artist Protection & Artistic Freedom in Asia”, captures growing anxiety over efforts to stifle artistic expression in 19 countries in South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia

Burmese artist and former political prisoner Htein Lin, and Vicky Bowman, the former British ambassador to Myanmar, were arrested on arbitrary charges in Yangon.

The execution of two activists, Ko Jimmy and Phyo Zayar Thaw, would be an irrevocable rejection of human rights and would mark a dramatic escalation in the military’s tactics of repression

In the face of authoritarian resurgence around the world, PEN America’s Freedom to Write Index documents cases of writers and public intellectuals who have been unjustly locked up for their exercise of free expression. At least 277 of them (in 36 countries) were in jail last year.