PEN America champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. The bedrock work of the global PEN network is advocacy and assistance on behalf of individuals persecuted for their use of the written word or other forms of expression. PEN America’s Writers at Risk Database is a searchable catalog of the writers, journalists, academics, public intellectuals and others under threat around the world. The database includes historical cases PEN America has worked on from 1987 onwards; non-active cases are color-coded black. PEN America is grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for support that enabled the establishment of the Writers at Risk Database and to PEN International for their collaboration in assembling this database.
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Columnist and literary writer Tian was arrested in August 2022 after publishing two letters about the dangers of worshiping of Xi Jinping, President of China. He was accused of “colluding with foreign forces,” and was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment in December 2022.
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Tint San was arrested with four other employees of the Unity newspaper after it published an exposé about an alleged secret chemical weapons factory. The ‘Unity Five’ were sentenced to seven years in prison in 2014, but were released in 2016 by a presidential amnesty.
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A Uyghur historian based in Japan, Tunyaz was arrested in 1998 after analyzing primary sources in Xinjiang for his book The Inside Story of the Silk Road. Imprisoned for 11 years for stealing state secrets, he was released in 2009. In May 2015, he died of a heart attack.
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Journalist and writer Piątek faced potential criminal charges for a book published in June 2017, which examines the links between Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz and the Russian military intelligence services and organized crime. In 2019, the case was dismissed.
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Yuen rose to prominence as a member of the popular Cantopop band E-kids. Now a leading pro-democracy activist on social media and in online articles, he is known for criticizing the judicial system, policing, and the government’s response to COVID-19. On February 15, 2022, he was arrested and charged with…
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Rapper Toomaj was briefly arrested in September 2021. Denied legal representation, in January 2022 he was given a 6-month suspended sentence for “insulting leadership” and “propaganda.” He was arrested again in October and put in solitary confinement and tortured. In July 2023, he was sentenced to 6 years and 3…
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Historian, researcher, and literary writer Touraj Amini was tried for “spreading propaganda against the state” and given a reduced sentence of six months in prison. While he was detained, his home was searched and his personal belongings seized, and his wife, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, was left without a…
Writers at Risk Database Key:
STATUS box that is red: Active case
STATUS box that is black: Inactive case
PEN America is deeply grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Freedom to Write Index and Writers at Risk Database.
PEN America thanks the PEN International Secretariat and the Writers in Prison Committee for their extensive contributions to and collaboration on compiling the cases included in this database.