Nadhir Al-Majid

Al-Majid was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison in January 2017 in connection with an opinion piece he wrote in 2011 titled “I protest, therefore I am,”… More

Writers at Risk Database

Svetlana Slapšak

Writer and activist Svetlana Slapšak faced physical and legal threats for her human rights work in Serbia. In 1989, she was dismissed from her job, and in 1991 fled… More

Mohammed Saud Al-Bishr

Al-Bishr, a professor and commentator on politics and religion, was arrested in October 2017. Human rights monitors report that he was arrested for commenting on excessive censorship in media.… More

Redha Al-Boori

Al-Boori was arrested in April 2019 in a wave of arrests targeting writers and commentators. Prior to his arrest, he had written about regional politics, though he had not… More

Abdulaziz Al-Hais

Al-Hais, who had written about the Arab Spring and the roles that intellectuals play in the Middle East, was arrested from his home in November 2019 as part of… More

Bader Al-Ibrahim

A dual U.S.-Saudi citizen, Al-Ibrahim was part of a group of journalists and bloggers detained without charge in April 2019. A doctor and author of a book on Shiite… More

Writers at Risk Database

Grigory Pasko

Since 1997, Pasko has faced repeated charges of treason for his reporting. In 2016 while traveling to Barnaul train local journalists, Pasko was met with an aggressive pattern of… More

Writers at Risk Database

Natalya Sharina

Sharina, head of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow, was detained and put under house arrest in 2015 after authorities raided the library and found several Ukrainian nationalist works… More

Junaid Hafeez

Hafeez, a liberal academic, was arrested for blasphemy in 2013 and has been in solitary confinement since 2014. An Islamist group lodged the accusation against him to prevent his… More

Abbad Yahya

Abbad Yahya

Yahya’s novel ‘Crime in Ramallah,’ which contains themes of politics, homosexuality, and religion, was ordered confiscated and banned in 2017. After an investigation was launched Yahya received death threats… More