Original research, legal analysis, and human-rights reporting from Amnesty Freedom — documenting the conditions faced by people excluded, persecuted, or silenced for what they believe, or choose not to believe.
Purnima Shil was twelve years old and serving as her party's polling agent when Bangladesh's 2001 election ended in defeat for the side she represented. Days later, dozens of men descended on her family's home. It took a decade for eleven of them to be sentenced, and her ordeal has since been repurposed by a political campaign far from the village where it happened.
Between 2013 and 2016, a series of bloggers and a publisher were hacked to death in Dhaka and Sylhet by men who had, in most cases, never read a word they wrote. The killings followed a pattern set years earlier: a name on a list, a machete, and a state slow to act.
A hydroelectric dam, a constitution with no word for them, and a peace accord still unimplemented after nearly three decades — how the Chittagong Hill Tracts became one of Asia's least visible ethnic conflicts, and why the government in Dhaka keeps changing without the policy ever changing.
In case after case, the person prosecuted under Bangladesh's blasphemy statute is the alleged author of an insult — while the person who gathered a mob around that claim walks away untouched. A closer reading of a century-old law suggests the courts have been aiming it at the wrong person all along.
A 1965 wartime order for confiscating "enemy" land never actually ended — it was renamed, inherited by an independent and constitutionally secular Bangladesh, and used for half a century to transfer millions of acres from Hindu families to politically connected beneficiaries.
Mushtaq Ahmed ran Bangladesh's first commercial crocodile farm and wrote a memoir about it. A handful of Facebook posts criticizing the government's COVID-19 response were enough to put him in a cell for nine months, and he never came out.
Raif Badawi built an online forum for Saudi liberals to argue about religion and reform. It cost him a decade in prison, a public flogging that stopped only when doctors said his body could not survive another round, and a family he still cannot join.
Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect a document so he could remarry. A fifteen member team was waiting for him. Years of trials, pardons, and an intelligence assessment later, the man who ordered his death has faced no direct sanction.
Mubarak Bala led Nigeria's small community of humanists and had once been forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward for declaring himself an atheist. A second round of persecution, over Facebook posts, took more than four years of his life and left the law that jailed him untouched.
Yahaya Sharif-Aminu shared song lyrics in a private WhatsApp group in 2020. A Sharia court in Kano sentenced him to hang for it. Six years, three courts, and one canceled hearing later, Nigeria's Supreme Court still has not said whether the law that condemned him is constitutional.
Asia Bibi drank from a shared cup while picking berries in a Punjab field in 2009. The accusation that followed put her on death row for nearly a decade, and her eventual acquittal helped get two government officials killed by their own bodyguards and supporters.
Mashal Khan was beaten to death by his own classmates over a blasphemy accusation investigators later found no evidence for. What they did find was that he had spent weeks criticizing his university's leadership, and that this, not religion, was very likely why he was killed.
Two brothers walked into a Paris newsroom on a January morning in 2015 and killed twelve people in about five minutes. The attack, its copycat sequel two days later, and the trials that stretched a decade past it reshaped how France talks about the right to offend.
Samuel Paty taught a lesson on free expression using cartoons his own students had seen dozens of times online. A father's Facebook video, built on a story his daughter had invented, set in motion a killing that took four years of French courts to fully untangle.
Alexei Navalny survived a nerve agent hidden in his clothing, flew home anyway, and spent his final years accumulating prison sentences until one of them killed him in an Arctic penal colony. A joint European statement in 2026 named the substance investigators had missed for years.
Ilham Tohti built a website where Uyghurs and Han Chinese could argue about Xinjiang policy without violence. Twelve years later, he is still in prison, his family has not seen him since 2017, and even human rights researchers are no longer certain where he is being held.
Jimmy Lai built Apple Daily into Hong Kong's loudest pro-democracy voice, then spent five years in solitary confinement waiting for a trial that ended, in February 2026, with the harshest sentence any journalist has received under the city's national security law.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah was jailed by four different Egyptian governments across fifteen years for the same basic offense: writing about the state. He was finally freed in 2025, after his own mother nearly starved herself to death demanding it.
Ahmet Altan was sentenced to life without parole for a coup he had no part in, freed by his own country's highest appeals court, and then prosecuted again, and again, on a version of the same charge. He is free today only because he is still appealing the latest one.
Gauri Lankesh was shot outside her own home for a decade of criticizing Hindu nationalism in print. The men accused of killing her have all been free on bail for years, one of them recently won a city council seat, and the trial itself has yet to produce a single conviction.
Daphne Caruana Galizia's last words on her own blog accused her country of being crooked, minutes before a car bomb ended her life. Nine years, five convictions, and one long-delayed trial later, Malta is only now hearing the case against the man accused of ordering it.
Miroslava Breach was driving her fourteen year old to school when eight bullets ended her reporting on cartel infiltration of local politics in Chihuahua. A note left at the scene tried to pin the killing on the wrong gang. Nearly a decade later, the man she named as its architect has still not been tried.
Two Reuters reporters were handed secret police documents at what they thought was a routine dinner, then arrested for possessing them. The massacre those documents helped expose sent seven soldiers to prison for ten years. The soldiers were free within months. The journalists were not.
Pham Doan Trang wrote guidebooks for ordinary Vietnamese citizens on how to engage peacefully with their own government. Six years after her arrest, and despite Hanoi releasing other prominent dissidents into exile, she remains in prison, marking her forty eighth birthday there this year.