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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Zhou (pen name Aqu Qiangba) is a poet and editor of Today. He was previously detained for seven months in 1989 for organizing a strike, and sentenced to three years in a labor camp in 1994 for engaging in labor movement propaganda. After a failed escape attempt, he was given…
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Zhou has published political commentaries and short stories in Hong Kong and for overseas Chinese-language publications. Initially detained in 2017, he was sentenced in June 2019 to four and a half years in prison. While imprisoned, his health gravely deteriorated. On May 9, 2022, Zhou was released from prison upon…
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Dissident poet Zhu served seven years in prison in connection with his poetry and was released in early 2018. Five months later, Zhu was briefly detained in September 2018 for “subversion of state power.” Police searched his home and took two computers, but he was released later that day. In…
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Al-Sofiani was a high ranking Wikipedia volunteer administrator with privileged access to edit protected pages. He was detained in 2020 and sentenced to 8 years in prison. It was reported that Al-Sofiani and colleague Osama Khaled updated Loujain Al-Hathloul’s wiki page in past years, among others.
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A prominent translator who protested the rise of Serbian nationalism during the Balkan Wars, Mutić fled Sarajevo in 1992, just before the siege of the Bosnian capital by the Serbian army. He has lived in exile ever since.
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Founder of TUNeZINE.com Yahyaoui was arrested in a cybercafe on charges of ‘false news’ and unauthorized use of the internet in June 2000. Having served half his sentence, he was released conditionally in 2003. On March 13, 2005, Yahyaoui passed away due to cardiac arrest.
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Kutbi was imprisoned in January 2019 as part of a crackdown on dissident journalists. He had already served 2 years from 2015-2017 on charges of “inciting against the state.” In prison, he allegedly suffers from torture, malnourishment, and denial of cancer treatment.
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.