Free Mohamed Tadjadit
Joint statement demands immediate release of Algerian Hirak poet Mohamed Tadjadit risking a death penalty sentence ahead of November 11 hearing. Ahead of upcoming court dates on 11 and 30 November 2025, 20 leading Algerian, regional and international organisations reiterate their calls on the Algerian authorities to drop all charges and release poet and activist Mohamed Tadjadit and his 12 co-defendants. Mohamed Tadjadit along with 12 other activists, six of whom are currently detained, two in exile and four who are free pending trial, are facing baseless terrorism-related and “conspiracy against the state” charges punishable by death as the maximum sanction possible. The persecution of Tadjadit is based on his poetry and peaceful activism, making his continued imprisonment a violation of his fundamental rights. His prosecution sends an alarming signal to others who raise their voices for human rights and the rule of law in Algeria. Tadjadit has long faced judicial harassment for his involvement in the Hirak movement that erupted in February 2019 to oppose the 5th term of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Although the President resigned, the protesters continued to demonstrate, calling for political reforms and stronger human rights protections, despite a swift and harsh crackdown by the authorities. The authorities imprisoned Tadjadit at least six times between 2019 and 2025, for his artistic expression and political activism. Judicial authorities are now accusing Tadjadit of terrorism and “conspiracy against the state” on the basis of his political activism expressed through his poetry. After being released under a presidential pardon from a previous period of detention in November 2024, the authorities arrested him again two months later on politically motivated charges. Following an expedited trial hearing, a judge sentenced him to five years in prison, which was later reduced to one year on appeal. Mohamed Tadjadit has been shortlisted for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards in recognition of his courageous and creative commitment to civilian rule, human rights, and democratic accountability in Algeria. His continued persecution, as well as the imprisonment of other protesters and prisoners of conscience, is a serious breach of Algeria’s obligations to international human rights law. We will continue to follow developments in these proceedings. Mohamed Tadjadit is a poet and activist and should not be in prison. We call for him to be released and for all charges to be dropped. Signed by: Index on CensorshipFreemuseJustitia Center for the Legal Protection of Human Rights in AlgeriaRiposte InternationaleCairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)MENA Rights GroupLiberté Algérie Shoaa For Human RightsLa Confédération Syndicale des Forces Productives (COSYFOP)International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) PEN AmericaARC – Artists at Risk ConnectionEuroMed RightsAmnesty InternationalPEN InternationalAdala For All association (AFA)La Fondation pour la promotion des droitsComité des Familles des Disparus en Algérie (CFDA)Comité de Sauvegarde de la Ligue Algérienne des Droits de l’Homme (CS-LADDH)Committee for Justice (CFJ)
A Fragile Victory for Artistic Freedom in Türkiye
Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ individuals are escalating in Türkiye, where Pride Marches and Pride Month events have been banned for more than a decade. A new draft law package expected to be submitted to parliament soon could further increase pressure on the LGBTQ+ community. However, in a rare positive development, a landmark court ruling has reaffirmed the protection of LGBTQ+ rights and the principles of freedom of thought, artistic freedom, and expression. The court has overturned the ban on “Turn and See Back: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Türkiye,” an exhibition hosted last summer by Depo, one of Istanbul’s leading independent art and culture venues. The exhibition was shut down shortly after opening because “it could provoke reactions from certain groups due to social sensitivities and could cause provocation.” Organised by the 10th Trans Pride Week Exhibition Collective, the exhibition opened on 26 June 2024, but was banned on 11 July following a notice from the Beyoğlu District Governor’s Office. Authorities also ordered the removal of all related content from the internet and social media platforms. Announcing the court’s decision on social media, the organisers described the ruling as “a sign of hope at a time when intolerance toward LGBTQ+ identities and expressions continues to manifest itself in various forms in Türkiye.” They added: “As the court ruling reminds us, in a country governed by the rule of law and respectful of human rights, the state’s positive obligation is not to restrict the visibility of diverse identities, but to stop those who attack them.” Asena Günal, director of the Anadolu Kültür organisation, which includes Depo, shared her views with Freemuse. While describing the decision as encouraging, she noted that it is not final, as the Beyoğlu District Governor’s Office plans to appeal and may take the case to the Court of Appeals. According to Günal, although administrative courts occasionally issue more liberal rulings, the government’s restrictive stance has become increasingly apparent. Günal also drew attention to the draft 11th Judicial Package, which contains discriminatory provisions directly targeting LGBTQ+ individuals and artists. She warned that pressure on LGBTQ+ visibility and expression is likely to intensify. “Two days after the statement about the exhibition decision, we gathered in Kadıköy to protest the 11th Judicial Package, which directly targets LGBTQ+ existence,” she said. “The police prevented us from reading our press statement or even holding banners. Although I see the lifting of the exhibition ban as an important step, I am not hopeful about the coming period. Everything related to LGBTQ+ visibility is being banned. The new bill even goes beyond visibility, seeking to criminalise existence itself.” Türkiye is moving past the “Year of the Family 2025”, a government-led initiative ostensibly to counter its declining birth rate by promoting traditional family values – a time when cultural expressions were banned for being seen as threats to traditional values, undermining artistic freedom and other fundamental rights. The new draft law signals that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric could soon be formalised as state policy. In this context, ongoing resistance and the defence of human and artistic rights have become more crucial than ever. By Özlem Altunok, Freemuse Türkiye Researcher
Day of the Dead: Artists Caught Between War and Cartels
The Day of the Dead on 2 November is a tradition observed across Latin America, honouring deceased loved ones and celebrating their lives. This year, Freemuse joins the celebration as an act of resistance and a testament to memory serving artistic freedom.
Same Old, Same Old: Censorship’s Quiet Routine
Imagine a smart, cheeky report with a playful visual language. Nothing like the typical output of human-rights groups. But, its harmless-looking cover, belies its contents. Koalisi Seni, an Indonesian advocacy group for artistic freedom, has just released Cerita Lama Berulang Kembali (Same Old, Same Old). Inside: sixty cases of censorship, harassment, intimidation. The highest figure in a decade.
Maja Smrekar: When politics and religion control women’s bodies, they control art
Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar is suing the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), for misusing her work – a performance in which she breastfed her puppy – during a referendum campaign on pension reforms. In a video interview from her studio in Ljubljana, she speaks with Musa Igrek of Freemuse about how her performance on kinship and care, K-9_topology: Hybrid Family, was turned into propaganda when an image from the exhibition was appropriated by the party. Smrekar explains why she is suing to defend artistic freedom for herself and the wider artistic community, and she reflects on how artists are increasingly pressured to self-censor while institutions hesitate to defend them. I want to hear about the nature of your artistic practice. How do you describe your works to your family and friends? And what can you tell us about K-9_topology: Hybrid Family, especially for readers who only saw the SDS billboard or just the photo? My artistic practice is an exploration of the kinship between humans and non-humans, including nature and technology. Through my art, I want to research and expose the dynamics of power between social order and politics, using the lens of ecological statements. Hybrid Family is a project that is part of my broader series of works under the umbrella title K-9_topology. These works, created between 2014 and 2017, a cycle of four works in which I examined the relationship between humans and dogs—beginning with research into our parallel evolution with wolves, and moving through scenarios that imagine dogs as family and reframe our relationship to wilderness in contemporary times. Formally, Hybrid Family involved a four-month process that began in autumn 2015 and ended in winter 2016. During this time, I followed a strict diet and specific physical training in order to induce lactation in my body, without pregnancy. I carried out this process in seclusion, but it culminated in a public performance where I breastfed my puppy. What message were you hoping to put forward with this act? There are a few levels to the statement in this project. On a universal level, especially connected to Europe, the work reimagines the Roman founding myth, where the she-wolf breastfeeds Romulus and Remus, the twins who then survived thanks to her and were able to build the civilisation on which much of humanism is still based. Through my work, I wanted to reverse that myth: a human nourishing a self-domesticated wolf that through evolution evolved into a dog. In the ancient myth, humans depended on nature to survive. I wanted to suggest that now nature depends on us to care for it, for its survival, and consequently, for ours as well. I staged an act of kinship that moved beyond the human order: nourishing not for the continuation of the nation, family, or species, but as a gesture of solidarity across boundaries. This is where the resistance to the cynicism of our times lies. Hybrid Family insists that the maternal body cannot be captured or reduced to reproduction alone. It proposes a form of abundant motherhood that can extend into wider forms of care, solidarity, and co-creation among humans and non-humans alike. I wanted to expand the notion of kinship beyond my own experience, beyond the nuclear family. Not as an opposition to the nuclear family, but as an extension of its possibilities. This expansion doesn’t only apply to animals, of course, but to everyone we consider as “the other”: migrants, for example, and people who are different from us in terms of class, gender, nationality, religion, and so on. On another level, the work was also deeply personal. I grew up in a family that didn’t have much time together, to share conversations or emotions. But I always connected strongly with dogs. My parents bred them, so I grew up surrounded by dogs, and they became family to me. They were the ones who helped me survive emotionally, because they were always present, and so caring. Your K-9_Topology: Hybrid Family won the Golden Nica in 2017 and Slovenia’s Prešeren Foundation Award in 2018. When did you first discover your Hybrid Family image on referendum posters, and what immediate impacts did you experience? In both cases, celebration was very much intertwined with anxiety. Whenever a major award is given in the field, institutions generate a lot of PR, which usually reaches audiences beyond the usual “tribe” of artistic institutions, artists, and curators. So, in both cases, my work found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first was in 2017 in Austria, just a few months before the elections. Right-wing populists, the so-called Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), picked up on my work because they found the topic useful for their agenda. They even submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister of Culture at the time, Thomas Drozda, directly targeting my K-9_topology series. In their nine-point document, FPÖ deputies Werner Neubauer and Walter Rosenkranz asked in Parliament whether my projects had been funded with Austrian public money. They had not. The prize I received (€10,000) did include Austrian money, and this deeply troubled them. Their narrative became: taxpayer money is going to a Slovenian artist who is breastfeeding dogs. What mattered was evoking disgust and very primal feelings in their target audience. Instead of engaging with all the exhibitions, lectures, publications, even documentaries around the work, they chose, in Austria and also later in Slovenia, to strip it completely of context and focus on a single photo, taken from a much larger body of work. They weaponized it as propaganda. So when the controversy reached Slovenia, how did it unfold? In Slovenia, the first wave of attacks began with Janez Janša, the leader of the far-right, the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) for 35 years, in 2018, after I received the Prešeren Foundation Award, the highest national award for arts. The campaign also extended to my colleague, Simona Semenič, a performer and playwright. The attacks were amplified across social media and far-right newspapers. At the time, I naively believed it was just a one-time event that
Freemuse’s 2025 Report: Latin America section and overview now in Spanish
Freemuse’s partner, Cartel Urbano, has published a Spanish translation of our annual State of Artistic Freedom 2025 overview, along with the Latin American section titled Creating and Resisting Under Multiple Threats in a Turbulent Latin America. Written by Diana Arévalo, the section highlights how, in 2024, Cuba and Venezuela intensified crackdowns on artists and dissenters, while Nicaragua used forced exile and the revocation of citizenship to silence critics. In Mexico, Peru, Haiti, and Colombia, systemic violence and organised crime claimed the lives of at least 10 artists and cultural leaders. Read the Spanish translation of the overview and the Latin American section here Agradecemos a nuestros colegas de Cartel Urbano por la traducción al español del Resumen Ejecutivo y del capítulo sobre América Latina del informe sobre el Estado de la Libertad Artística en el Mundo (SAF 2025). Léelo aquí