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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Liu is an online activist focused on environmental protection and human rights. He was summoned in 2016 by local police and detained for more than 10 hours for an article critical of the government he posted online. Liu has also used online forums to discuss controversial public issues. In January…
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Liu, an activist who runs a website circulating information on human rights abuses, was sentenced to five years in prison and severe fines in January 2019 after his initial 2016 detention. He spent over a year in prison without access to a lawyer. In July 2019, Liu’s appeal request was…
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A key figure in the Democracy Wall movement, Liu was arrested as one of the Beijing Fifteen dissidents in 1992 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for counter-revolutionary activities. He was released in November 2004.
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Graphic novelist Tianyi was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison in 2018 for making and selling obscene material. Her self-published novel Gongzhan is about a forbidden love affair between a teacher and a student and contains graphic depictions of homosexual sex.
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After her husband Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for calling for political reforms in China, poet Lu Xia was held incommunicado under extralegal house arrest. Following a global campaign, in July 2018 she was allowed to leave China for Germany.
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For writing articles calling for political reform, Liu was searched and arrested in June 2010 and sentenced to ten years in prison where he was reportedly forced to labor 13 hours daily. Since his release on June 27, 2020, he has been surveilled and monitored by police.
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A pro-democracy activist and writer, Liu was arrested in 2009, charged with “inciting subversion of state power,” and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2010 for penning seven sentences. Diagnosed with liver cancer, Liu passed away on July 13, 2017 while on medical parole.
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Blogger Liu, who has written about politics and democracy on WeChat since 2009, was detained in 2018 after a six-month period of residential surveillance. She was sentenced to four years in prison in May 2020 for “picking quarrels” following her anti-communist posts. On March 23, 2022, she was released from…
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.