PEN Canada envisions a world where
writers are free to write,
readers are free to read,
and freedom of expression prevails
PEN International calls for the immediate and unconditional release of poet, lawyer and independent journalist Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces. In April 2019, he was detained while he was covering a trial for news website CubaNet. Quiñones Haces was released five days later and fined for conduct during his detention allegedly constituting ‘disobedience’ and ‘resistance’. After refusing […]
Mass protests have broken out in every state following the killing of security guard George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. During these protests, police forces have arrested more than a dozen journalists, and at least 140 attacks against journalists, perpetrated overwhelmingly by police forces, have been reported. We urge President Donald Trump to condemn these acts […]
Today, PEN International, Danish PEN, English PEN, German PEN, Norwegian PEN, PEN America, PEN Canada, Swedish PEN and PEN Turkey joined the International Press Institute (IPI) and 10 other international press freedom and freedom of expression groups in a joint public letter sent to the General Director of Turkey’s Public Advertising Agency (BIK), which is […]
Aaron Berhane, an award-winning journalist and publisher, is the recipient of the 2019 PEN Canada-Humber College Writers-in-Exile Scholarship and acting Chair of PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile Committee. He was co-founder and editor-in-chief of Setit, Eritrea’s first and largest independent newspaper, until September 2001 when it was shut down during a government crackdown. Berhane lived […]
London, May 18, 2020.- The assassination of Jorge Miguel Armenta Ávalos, director of El Tiempo newspaper; threats against the newspaper Reforma; the recent investigations of Notimex; and stigmatizing comments about media and journalists by the authorities demonstrate the insecurity in which journalists live in Mexico, said PEN International and PEN Centres in Guadalajara and San Miguel de Allende. On […]
Organizations which support human rights, press freedom and journalists are calling on United Nations mechanisms and member states to help save the lives of four Yemeni journalists who were sentenced to death in April 2020 in the capital Sana’a on charges of “spying” and “spreading false news.” Of the six other journalists in the same case whom […]
PEN International is highly concerned about the arrest and continued detention of reporter, lawyer and human rights defender Elchin Mammad. On 30 March 2020, a few days after Mammad published a critical report on the human rights situation in Azerbaijan, police arrested him at his home, claiming to have found stolen jewellery in his office. […]
PEN Malaysia is deeply concerned by the selective targeting of Malaysian journalist Tashny Sukumaran by the authorities for her report in the South China Morning Post on 1 May 2020 headlined Coronavirus: Hundreds arrested as Malaysia cracks down on migrants in COVID-19 red zones. On 2 May 2020, she received a telephone call from the Royal Malaysian […]
On World Press Freedom Day, PEN International published its 2019 Case List, documenting 212 cases of writers facing harassment, arrest, violence and even death. Read and download the Case List For nearly a century, PEN International has monitored and advocated for writers who have suffered repression of their right to write freely and to comment on […]
Fatih Demir, an exiled Turkish journalist, is PEN Canada’s current Writer-in-Residence at George Brown College. Demir was an economics reporter for Today’s Zaman, an English-language daily inTurkey and fled to Canada in 2016 while hundreds of journalists were being jailed in the wake of the failed 2015 coup. Demir was recently interviewed by PEN’s Communications […]
Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules