Writer and Kurdish PEN member Gulgeç Akdeniz – pen name Gulgeş Deryaspî – remained on trial at the end of the year, appealing a six-year three-month prison term imposed after conviction on 3 December 2020 of ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ under Article 314/2 of Türkiye’s Penal Code. She denies any wrongdoing…

Impunity continues for the murder of Hrant Dink, author and editor of the Armenian language magazine Agos, killed outside his office in Istanbul on 19 January 2007. In July 2011, 17-year-old Ogün Samast was sentenced to 22 years and 10 months in prison for Dink’s murder…

A writer and journalist, Dong Yuyu is currently serving a seven-year prison term after conviction of ‘espionage’. Police initially detained Dong on 21 February…

On 20 September 2024 at around 4pm, a group of Russian-speaking men wearing clothes with far-right Serbian imagery, entered the premises of the KROKODIL Centre for Contemporary Literature in Belgrade, took down a Ukrainian flag and intimidated staff. KROKODIL, which notably set up the first Ukrainian library in Serbia…

Writer and academic Jovo Bakić continued to face threats and harassment by government officials and pro-government social media trolls in 2024, with Minister for Family Care and Demography Milica Đurđević notably branding him ‘extremist’. Bakić further told PEN International he received several online messages threatening him and his family during the year…

Photojournalist and social activist Shahidul Alam continued to face an ongoing legal case centred on allegations of ‘giving false information’, ‘hurting…

Dinko Gruhonjić, a journalist, writer, and lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of Novi Sad in Vojvodina, northern Serbia, has been facing increased harassment, smears, and death threats since 14 March 2024, following the publication of an edited video in which…

Poet and lawyer imprisoned for royal defamation after peacefully calling for the law’s repeal

A poet and human…

On 2 February 2024, the Belgrade Court of Appeals announced that it had acquitted four former Serbian state security officers who had already been twice convicted of the murder of journalist, editor, and publisher Slavko Ćuruvija, shot and killed outside his house in…

Theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk are each serving lengthy prison sentences handed down by a military court in Moscow in July 2024, on fabricated ‘terrorism’ grounds…

Following campaigning by PEN Norway and PEN International, publisher William Nygaard’s legal team successfully appealed against the decision to close the investigation into the 1993 attempted murder of Nygaard, with the Norwegian authorities announcing on 24 July 2024 that the investigation would resume. ..

Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries died on 15 July 2021 from injuries sustained in a shooting in Amsterdam nine days earlier. De Vries was shot five times, including in the head, while on his way to a car park after leaving the studio of RTL Boulevard…

In March 2024, a court in Podgorica dropped all charges and dismissed the case against academic, writer, and vice president of the Montenegrin PEN Centre Boban Batrićević. Batrićević had faced up to 60 days in prison or a fine under Article 19 of Montenegro’s National Law on Public Order and Peace, which prohibits national…

In March 2024, an effigy of prominent writer, journalist and PEN member Andrej Nikolaidis, was burnt at a carnival in Herceg Novi, southwestern Montenegro. The incident was the latest in a series of harassment and smears against Nikolaidis, on account of his views critical of the Montenegrin authorities (see Case List 2022)…