Free Them All: The Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners

When Cuban authorities moved to stifle artistic expression, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara put his body and his freedom on the line and took to the streets. 

On July 11, 2021, artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara posted a video on Instagram to tell his followers that he planned to join an antigovernment protest in Havana: “Family, I am going to the streets,” he said. “Whatever it costs me. Democracy is what we want.” 

The Cuban people lost their fear. Thousands of citizens turned out that day in what became the largest protest movement on the island in decades. They demanded their freedom after more than 60 years under a one-party regime that has stifled nearly every aspect of public and private life, from politics and religion to economic opportunity and access to basic goods.  

While Otero Alcántara’s brave declaration led to his ongoing detention, he had already spent many years building a reputation for personal and artistic courage. 

Born in the impoverished Cerro neighborhood of Havana, Otero Alcántara had little access to the world of Cuba’s artistic elite. As a young man, he became a professional athlete but longed to express himself more creatively. He discovered performance art, which allowed him to bring together the athletic skills he knew well and his burgeoning artistic curiosity to develop works of genuine emotional and political depth. 

Otero Alcántara felt free as he pursued his new calling and continued to gain confidence, offering performances and other forms of art that imagined a better Cuba and took the government to task. In 2016, he worked with Yanelys Nuñez Leyva to create the Museum of Dissidence (Museo de la Disidencia), a project that focused on expressions of opposition to the Cuban regime. 

In 2018, the Cuban authorities began a new crackdown on artistic expression and passed Decree 349, a law requiring artists to seek government approval for their work and criminalizing anything that officials deem to be “obscene.” 

Rather than being deterred by the law, Otero Alcántara was emboldened. Alongside fellow artists including Maykel Castillo Pérez, he cofounded the San Isidro Movement (MSI), which began organizing public artistic protests against Decree 349 and other repressive laws and policies. In one case in 2019, the group called on Cubans to take photos of themselves wearing the Cuban flag under the hashtag #LaBanderaEsDeTodos, or “the flag is for all,” to protest the Cuban government’s restrictions on how the flag could be displayed. 

Otero Alcántara has faced serious consequences for his work. Since 2017, he has been arrested 21 times. In November 2020, he along with many artists and political activists went on a hunger strike in his house for several days. They were evicted by authorities and Otero Alcántara was then disappeared before being taken to a hospital by force. The day he was forcibly evicted, more than 200 artists gathered in front of the Ministry of Culture (the largest public protest of artists ever seen) forcing the Minister of Culture to negotiate with them. Since his July 2021 arrest, Alcántara has remained in a maximum-security prison, engaging in a series of hunger strikes to protest his confinement. He was sentenced to five years in prison in June 2022 after a closed-door trial, and his health continues to deteriorate as authorities deny him proper medical care.  

In 2022, while still imprisoned, Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez jointly received Freedom House’s annual Freedom Award.

Like so many others, Otero Alcántara believes that all Cubans deserve to be free and is willing to do what it takes to break their chains. He knows that artistic freedom comes with great risk in an authoritarian state, but his body is his canvas, and he has always put it on the line.

A promising young hip-hop artist emerges defiantly from Cuba’s artistic underground to confront a government intent upon censoring free expression. 

The image went viral: a young Cuban dissident in a fighter’s stance. The crowd around him parted, clearing a space. Blue jeans, black belt, no shirt. His right arm raised in defiance and his hand a fist. A pair of handcuffs dangles from his wrist. By all appearances, he’s a man with nothing to lose. Nothing except his freedom. 

This is Maykel Castillo Pérez—otherwise known as Maykel Osorbo. He’s a musician and an author and people know him. As a rising star in Cuba’s underground hip-hop scene, Osorbo had amassed quite a following. He was making art, making friends, just doing his thing. But when the totalitarians started doing their thing—in this case, censoring artists— Osorbo wasn’t silent. He jumped into his fighter’s stance. 

In 2018, the Cuban government passed Decree 349, which allowed the authorities to arbitrarily ban art they did not like. Osorbo and his fellow artists organized, founding the San Isidro Movement (MSI), which began defiantly advocating on behalf of artistic freedom.  

The authorities cracked down. They started raiding neighborhoods, targeting MSI and its members.    

When you’re a target, instinct tells you to be careful. If you work, work in the shadows. Lay low. But Osorbo doesn’t lay low. He and his collaborators did what they do best—they made art. They wrote a protest anthem. 

Back when Fidel Castro and his followers battled Fulgencio Batista’s government, the revolutionaries adopted a rallying cry: “Patria o Muerte.” Homeland or Death. Students of history, Osorbo and his collaborators reached all the way back, snatching their cry and transforming it into something hopeful: “Patria o Muerte” became “Patria y Vida.” Homeland and Life.

The anthem won two awards at the 2021 Latin Grammys, but Osorbo wasn’t on stage to receive them. He had been arrested, detained, released; arrested, detained, released. The cycle continued from April 2019 to early 2021. Each time he emerged, he took to the streets. Loud. Defiant. Fist in the air. 

On May 18, 2021, Cuban authorities arrested and detained him, but this time they didn’t let him out. Rumors spread about mistreatment in prison, about his deteriorating health. Human rights organizations, Freedom House among them, called for his immediate release. But no release was granted. 

When he was finally given some semblance of judicial process—a “trial” in Cuba’s notoriously subservient courts—he was sentenced to nine years in the maximum-security prison at Pinar del Rio. As of this writing, Osorbo remains behind the thick walls there. No word on his health. No word on his release. 

In 2022, while still imprisoned, Osorbo and his compatriot Luis Manuel Otero Alcantára received Freedom House’s annual Freedom Award. As their MSI collaborator Anamely Ramos approached the stage to accept the award on their behalf, “Patria y Vida” provided the soundtrack.  

They broke our door, they blew up our temple and the world knows that the San Isidro Movement continues.

The son of an Islamic scholar became an outspoken atheist and earned the enmity of government authorities. His fearless advocacy on behalf of religious freedom resulted in a 24-year prison sentence. 

As their first anniversary approached, Mubarak Bala and his wife, Amina, were overjoyed that they were expecting a son. But less than six weeks after his son was born and only eight months into their marriage, Bala was taken away from his family. Plainclothes officers came to his home to arrest him for insulting the prophet Muhammad before he could reunite with Amina, who resided in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja. 

This was not the first time that he was targeted for his speech, but it would be the last time he was free.  

The son of an Islamic scholar and a chemical engineer by training, Bala grew up in northern Nigeria. Though the country’s constitution bars the federal and state governments from adopting a state religion, Sharia (Islamic law) is recognized in several northern states, where most of Nigeria’s Muslim population resides. Bala, who began exploring religion in his youth, spoke openly about leaving Islam. He began advocating for freedom of religion in Nigeria and was particularly outspoken about the restrictive environment in his home state of Kano, which employs Sharia. 

He also campaigned against blasphemy laws, educated others about human rights, and spoke out on the dangers of religious extremism. As Bala became one of the country’s most prominent critics of religion, he began receiving death threats. In 2014, his family conspired to drug, beat, and forcibly commit him to a psychiatric ward, claiming that his atheism was a sign of a personality disorder. 

Bala was released after a two-week stay, only to face continued threats to his safety and accusations of apostasy for his decision to break from Islam, even though states using Sharia law do not label it as an offense in their penal codes. After remaining in hiding, he fell in love and decided to stay in Nigeria, moving to the secular Kaduna State. He became president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, advocating for freedom of belief and for atheists’ rights.  

But in April 2020, Bala was arrested by plainclothes officers in Kaduna over Facebook comments that allegedly insulted the prophet Muhammad. He was transferred back to Kano, and has not been with his family since. 

The case against Bala was riddled with procedural irregularities from the very beginning. He was held without charge for more than a year and denied access to medical care and to his legal team, during a time when Nigeria’s constitutional promise of religious freedom was severely undermined. The Federal High Court in Abuja ruled Bala’s arrest unconstitutional that December and ordered authorities to bail him. Any hope that the ruling would set him free faded, however, as the court’s order was ignored. 

When the trial finally concluded in April 2022, Bala received a severe and disproportionate 24-year prison sentence from the Kano State High Court, which ignored his pleas for leniency. His case painfully demonstrates not only how pervasive religious repression is in Nigeria, but how ineffective institutions like the Federal High Court are in upholding constitutional protections. 

The last thing Bala said to his wife on the phone was, “Amina, do not worry, I will be out, and we will make up for the lost years we have missed as a family. I will make it up for our son.”  

His son will turn three years old in 2023. It may take many more years before Bala can keep that promise to a boy who is still too young to remember meeting his father in prison.

Disgusted by years of abuse directed at Indigenous tribes and spurred by a brutal murder, Nasser Zefzafi fought for freedom on behalf of his people–and lost his own in the battle.  

Resilience. A simple word with heartbreaking implications. It’s what one recognizes in Nasser Zefzafi, who led the nonviolent Hirak (“movement”) protests in the Rif, a region in Morocco home to many Indigenous tribes. Zefzafi has paid the price for his leadership; he was arrested in 2017 and received a 20-year prison sentence for undermining public order and threatening national unity in 2018.  

Zefzafi was born in Al Hoceima, the Rif’s largest city, in 1979. His family has long been steeped in the political activism of the region, pride in their Riffian identity, and a willingness to lead. In the 1920s, his great-grandfather served as a minister of the short-lived Rif Republic, as local tribes sought independence from colonial Spain.  

So Zefzafi’s decision to serve as a key leader of the 2016 Hirak, which was propelled by security officers’ brutal murder of fishmonger Mohsin Fekri in Al Hoceima that October, was no surprise. Zefzafi and his compatriots organized massive nonviolent demonstrations to advocate for investment and economic development; the Moroccan government had drained the Rif of resources.  

Zefzafi’s commitment to nonviolence and justice is as remarkable as his resilience. In a 2018 letter to the European Parliament, Zefzafi recounts a litany of abuses committed against his people: the extermination of a complete tribe in 1898; Spanish forces’ use of chemical weapons in the 1921–26 war that left Riffians riddled with cancer; the brutal response to a 1958 revolt; the 1984 Bread Uprising, which authorities violently smashed; and the Arab Spring, when authorities killed and burned the bodies of five young men. 

Zefzafi recalls this bitter history to demand freedom and dignity—not revenge—for himself and his people. In his own words, he aims to “one day awaken in an armless world,” with its citizens living “in peace on this beautiful blue planet.” Despite this commitment to nonviolence, Zefzafi and many other activists have been mercilessly prosecuted, imprisoned, and tortured since receiving their prison sentences. Their legal defenders are not immune from the government’s ongoing wrath, either: In November 2022, Mohammed Ziane, who represented Zefzafi, was arrested and sent to prison on a wide array of charges. In the wake of Zefzafi’s own conviction, his parents have had to demonstrate their own resilience in the face of his absence and their own sense of loss; his mother, Zoulikha, has donned black every Eid since.

Despite his imprisonment, Zefzafi’s leadership is still crucial to the Riffian cause. From his jail cell, he has documented the abuses perpetrated by security forces against him and other activists. After he released a video in July 2017 detailing his treatment, protests erupted in several cities—within and outside of the Rif—calling for his release. 

The government’s crackdown has largely snuffed out the Hirak’s momentum, but the movement’s breadth and depth are still unprecedented in the Rif’s history. It was the largest series of public demonstrations since 2011, gathering tens of thousands of people. Zefzafi and other Hirak leaders were noteworthy for expressing socioeconomic demands, receiving national and international attention, and transcending class divisions, all without violence. Riffians, who remain committed to political change in the Hirak's wake, have also inspired Moroccans outside of the Rif to more openly criticize the government through their own bravery. 

Nasser Zefzafi has demonstrated resilience when advocating for his fellow Riffians; now, he must rely on them to apply that same trait for his sake. His health is deteriorating in prison as his captors prevent him from receiving medical treatment. From his cell he has told us of his despair, of his loss of hope. Now, he is relying on others to keep the spirit of the Hirak alive—not only so that fellow Riffians live dignified, just, and free lives, but that he can too.

After publicizing a link between the Vietnamese government and a company responsible for an environmental disaster, a reporter was forced to choose between safeguarding his own freedom and speaking truth to power.

Dead fish washing up on beaches across Vietnam. Hundreds of people mysteriously falling ill. Silence from the government. Then, protests. A courageous young Vietnamese reporter detained, beaten, imprisoned for filming it all.  

That reporter is Nguyễn Văn Hoá, a Vietnamese activist and journalist affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA). He has been imprisoned since 2017, after bravely reporting on what has since been labeled one of the largest environmental disasters the country has ever seen. 

In April 2016, along more than 100 miles of coastline in central Vietnam, marine life crucial to the local economy began to disappear. Over the next few months, an estimated 70 tons of dead fish, squid, and other sea creatures washed up on shores across four of the country’s provinces, and hundreds of people became ill after eating fish that had been contaminated. The cause of this disaster: the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant had dumped large quantities of toxic waste into the ocean. 

While fishing bans were instituted soon after the chemical dump happened, the government failed to officially identify those responsible for several months and worked to suppress news about the disaster. This sparked a rare series of protests, attracting thousands of participants across the country over the course of several months. 

Nguyễn is from one of the regions most affected by the chemical spill; the disaster was personal. He was one of the first to expose its effects to the public and reported on the protest movement it ignited. In October 2016, Nguyễn’s footage of the protests went viral. All the while, he witnessed the government crackdown on the demonstrators and other journalists around him. 

In November, he was briefly detained by police, who beat him and confiscated his phone and camera. Nguyễn was arrested again in January 2017 on sham drug possession charges. By the time his family was notified of his arrest and detention nearly two weeks later, the charges against him had changed, with police accusing him of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state.” In April 2017, the charges were changed again, and Nguyễn was convicted of “disseminating propaganda against the state” and sentenced to seven years in prison and three years of house arrest. 

At each new turn, Nguyễn has held firm, defiantly advocating for his rights and freedom, as well as those of the people affected by the disaster and the government’s subsequent crackdown. The trial to convict him in November was a mere two-and-a-half hours long. Nguyễn refused to testify against other detained political prisoners. For his defiance and support of his fellow activists, he was again beaten. 

Since his initial arrest in January 2017, Nguyễn has been subjected to grave human rights abuses.  While incarcerated, Nguyễn has repeatedly been denied access to his family, especially throughout 2021 as the pandemic grew severe in the country. While visits have resumed since March 2022, he has repeatedly protested his mistreatment, including launching hunger strikes in both 2020 and 2021. Held in solitary confinement at least twice in retaliation, his health has seriously declined as prison guards have severely beaten him on multiple occasions; whether he has received medical care is unclear.  

Nguyễn saw injustice and spoke out, repeatedly placing himself in harm’s way. He has been imprisoned for more than five years, and still faces several more years of prison time and house arrest. He stood up for his neighbors, for other political prisoners, for people he does not know. Now he needs others to stand up for him, and work to obtain his immediate release.

Being a journalist in a free society is hard. Being a journalist in Turkey is harder. Being a woman and a journalist in Turkey—and reporting on human rights abuses committed by Turkish security forces? That’s almost impossible. Almost.

“They attack every part of society to create an obedient and docile society,” wrote Safiye Alagaş about the Turkish government in a letter from Diyarbakır Women’s Closed Prison, where she has been imprisoned since June 2022. She shares her cramped cell with 14 other journalists—and a 24-hour surveillance camera. She is allowed no books or newspapers of her own choice. There isn’t enough soap or shampoo for all 15 of them, creating unsanitary conditions. So they protested: a five-day hunger strike that resulted in disciplinary proceedings. Previously, Alagaş and her cellmates were disciplined for singing and dancing in their cell. They got one month with no communications for the offense. 

Alagaş sits in prison with her fellow journalists, accused of making “terrorist propaganda” following a police raid at her home and the newsroom she manages. The police confiscated her cameras, phone, computer hard drives, and other equipment because of an article her news agency, JIN News, published about the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is outlawed as a terrorist group in Turkey. The article, it is alleged, took a pro-PKK angle. 

Alagaş has been detained and arrested before—several times. In October 2019, she was acquitted of the same charges. In fact, almost all of the journalists at her news agency—which is staffed entirely by women—have been frequent targets of Turkey’s censors and prosecutors, as they report about the conflict between the Turkish state and the separatist PKK, a conflict that has claimed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 lives since 1984 according to the International Crisis Group. 

JIN News also reports on violence against women and on alleged human rights abuses by Turkish security forces. In October 2020, the news agency broke a story that accused Turkish forces of throwing two Kurdish shepherds out of a moving helicopter. One was killed and the other was gravely injured. The state acknowledged the incident, but claimed the shepherds sustained their injuries in an attempt to evade capture. After reporting the story, a colleague of Alagaş’s was arrested for “inciting enmity against the state.”  

Civil society watchdogs and journalists point to Turkey’s ambiguous laws as enabling such extreme retaliation. The laws are written in such a way that legitimate journalism activities, such as reporting on the funeral of an extremist or attending a political rally in opposition to the government, are open to criminal prosecution. As of December 2022, there are 40 journalists imprisoned in Turkey, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). 

JIN News is based in the predominantly Kurdish region of Diyarbakır and is published in both Turkish and Kurdish. Its coverage of women’s issues has been connected to the pro-Kurdish political movement, which is perceived as an affront by the Turkish government and includes as part of its platform a demand for equal rights for women. The outlet’s reporting also comes at a time that the Turkish government has been accused of failing to protect women, particularly when it comes to domestic abuse. The Turkish state has also withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention, an international agreement designed to protect women’s rights.   

Alagaş continued to write and conduct her reporting from detention before a court ordered her release on June 15, 2023, for the duration of her trial. This most recent reporting focused on prison conditions and the abuses she saw behind prison walls, through letters she gave to visitors. In one of those letters, she made her goals clear: “We, women, made silent promises, screamed our promises, looked into each other's eyes and promised: We will not give up the struggle until we find our place in society. We don't give up until we obtain our freedom. Our ultimate and final goal is our freedom.”

Though Alagaş has yet to be acquitted and is due back in court in November 2023, her goal of freedom remains unchanged.

While preparing to return to university in the United Kingdom, Salma al-Shehab was arrested in Saudi Arabia on charges related to national security. Her crime? Retweeting. Her punishment? Thirty-four years in prison.

After reaching the final year of her doctoral research in dentistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, Salma al-Shehab was eager to be reunited with her family in Saudi Arabia. This visit would be a short one, but she was nearing the goal she had been working toward for so long—the moment when she could finally bring her family back with her to Britain and start a new life. 

Things didn’t go as planned. Not long before her return trip to the UK, Saudi authorities summoned her for questioning over her Twitter activity. She has remained behind bars ever since.  

Al-Shehab certainly wasn’t known as an activist when she was detained. She is a member of Saudi Arabia’s Shia Muslim minority, a dedicated mother, and a diligent scholar of dental medicine who was pursuing her dream of earning a PhD. She was already a lecturer at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University. While she has a social media account, a search for her name won’t reveal any public political activity.  

But in January 2021, al-Shehab was detained on charges that she posed a threat to Saudi Arabia’s national security because she had retweeted posts in support of women’s right to drive and the release of well-known activists, including Loujain al-Hathloul.  

Al-Shehab spent 285 days in pretrial detention, including 13 in solitary confinement. She never saw her family and was not given access to a lawyer. After a closed-door trial in a special court for terrorism cases, she was initially sentenced to six years in prison for “causing public unrest” and attempting to “destabilize civil and national security.” Because she was not a public activist, she was told that she would likely be released in three years. 

Apparently hoping to make an example of her, however, the state prosecutor called for a harsher sentence on appeal, arguing that the penalty must match the severity of her actions and deter others from engaging in such speech. 

In August 2022, more than two years after she retweeted posts out of what she described as “curiosity,” al-Shehab’s sentence was increased to 34 years in prison and a 34-year travel ban following her imprisonment. The new verdict included assertions that her actions had violated laws meant to combat cybercrime as well as terrorism. In January 2023, the Supreme Court overturned the appellate court’s ruling and returned al-Shehab’s case to the special court for terrorism cases to be retried. At the retrial later that month, the cybercrime-related charges against al-Shehab were dropped, but the terrorism charges against her were not. The court resentenced Salma al-Shehab to 27 years in prison, followed by a 27-year travel ban. She was not allowed to speak on her own behalf during the retrial. Several other women were also convicted on similar charges and handed lengthy prison sentences by the special court.

While her new sentence can be appealed, at the time of writing, Salma al-Shehab remains in prison. She continues to insist on her innocence, and wishes only to rejoin her family and finish her studies.

A member of Ukraine’s Crimean Tatar ethnic and religious minority was convicted by a Russian court on charges of terrorism and sent to a forced labor camp. His crime? Providing help and legal aid to other wrongly convicted friends and neighbors in occupied Crimea. 

Server Mustafayev provided assistance to families of other Crimean Tatars whose loved ones were disappeared or arrested. For this, he’s now serving a 14-year sentence in a Russian maximum-security labor camp. 

Crimean Tatars are among the groups that make up the multiethnic tapestry that is Ukraine’s population. Expelled to Central Asia by Stalin, who tarred them falsely as Nazi collaborators, since the 1980s many have made the long journey back to Crimea to reestablish life at home. When Russian military forces invaded the peninsula in 2014, Tatars resisted. By the year’s end, they were the only group in Crimea that dared to openly oppose the occupation. In return, Russian forces shut down the Mejlis, their assembly, banned Tatar leaders from Crimea, and embarked on a campaign of persecution featuring home raids, arbitrary detentions, and enforced disappearances. 

It was Mustafayev’s work as coordinator for the civil society group Crimean Solidarity that caught the eye of Russian authorities. The group was founded to provide legal and other assistance to the families of Crimean Tatars and other Muslims being persecuted under Russian occupation, but has since expanded to help any political dissidents, no matter their religion or ethnicity.  

“Since 2014, our people have been subject to repression,” said his wife, Maryam Mustafayev. “Searches were carried out, families were left without breadwinners, and pressure began on all who disagreed with what was happening. Mustafayev was one of the first to film searches and broadcast them on networks,” she said. After working long hours during the day, he spent evenings visiting the families of political prisoners, where he listened, offered counsel, and tended to their needs as best he could. 

On May 21, 2018, Mustafayev’s home was raided and he was placed under arrest. Like many Crimean Tatars, he was charged with being a member of the nonviolent Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, which Russia has designated a terrorist group but which operates legally in Ukraine and many other countries. Legal procedures against him in Crimea’s occupied courts were a sham. No evidence was presented to substantiate charges of terrorist activity. The court instead accepted testimony from a “secret witness,” audio recordings of Mustafayev and his codefendants discussing religion and politics, and conclusions from a so-called religious expert with little background on Islam. In 2020, as the case dragged on, authorities refused to treat him for symptoms of COVID-19. In September of that year Mustafayev was finally convicted on charges of terrorism and conspiring to overthrow the authorities, and placed in a harsh prison colony. 

Mustafayev’s four children ask Maryam every day when he will return home. His youngest—a daughter—was only a few months old when he was arrested. “Server is my second half,” Maryam said. She and the children live with Mustafayev’s parents now. They’re dealing with hardship in his absence. Their oldest daughter is suffering from health issues the family believes were brought on by stress.  

Still, Mustafayev’s family and his community know he will persevere for what he believes is right. As he addressed the court at the close of his trial, Mustafayev said, “It is impossible to live simply and silently, as if nothing had happened: not to get involved in politics, to remain deaf and blind to the obvious injustice. Find the strength to face the truth—no one will do it for you.”

Forced to flee her native Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge made her an orphan, a fearless human rights advocate left the safety of the United States to return to her homeland and confront its fierce autocratic regime.

A prodemocracy activist dressed defiantly as the Statue of Liberty stood at a Phnom Penh courthouse, waiting for the judge to hand down the verdict that would seal her future. The news arrived: six years in prison, for the crime of resisting Cambodia’s suffocating, one-man regime. Theary Seng was led away, a police officer gripping each arm. 

It was the latest injustice inflicted upon a woman who has dedicated her life to the struggle for freedom. After her parents were killed by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, seven-year-old Theary Seng fled her homeland—first to Thailand, and then to the United States, where she became a human rights lawyer. Drawn to a bold movement to build democracy in Cambodia, she returned home in 2004. Even as Prime Minister Hun Sen—in power for two decades at that point—had a firm grip on the country, Seng was hopeful. Journalists, though persecuted, were working, and critics openly challenged Hun Sen’s repressive, corruption-prone government. 

For her part, Seng founded and ran the Center for Justice and Reconciliation, served as president of the Center for Cambodian Civic Education (CIVICUS Cambodia), and provided legal aid to former victims of the Khmer Rouge. She also began to challenge Hun Sen, who by 2018 had shut down Cambodia’s last remaining independent newspaper and banned all parties but his own, imprisoning would-be challengers and driving others into exile. 

Undeterred by the threat of imprisonment in Cambodia’s squalid jails, where inmates risk malnutrition and torture, Seng blasted Hun Sen on social media and rallied support for the exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy as he worked to stage a dangerous political comeback. Her broadside against Hun Sen’s abuses and demands for freedom won her charges of treason. Often arriving in court wearing eye-grabbing costumes—meant to mock the absurdity of the political theater against her—she and dozens of codefendants were summarily convicted in a shameless mass trial in June 2022. Authorities took her into custody, and promptly transferred her to a remote facility in a far-flung northeastern village, where she remains isolated from her family and lawyers and is cut off from all contact with the outside world.  

But Hun Sen and his cronies don’t understand who Seng is: a fighter who won’t give up the battle for freedom. A US dual national, she could have easily fled Cambodia during her trial. Instead, she continued to face the government head on. Before her conviction, she dramatically chopped off her long hair in a live-streamed video, declaring that she was prepared to serve time—but that she’d better have a haircut due to lice and scabies that infest the country’s jails. Now in prison, authorities recently banned her from attending church and using the phone. In response she launched a hunger strike that has drawn international attention to a regime that governs through repression and fear. 

Throughout her life, Seng has stood her ground in the face of terror and evil. In 2002, she even visited the man she held responsible for her parents’ murder: Khieu Samphan, who was later convicted of genocide. Even from an isolated prison, she exhibits the same strength and commitment. As she traveled, dressed as Lady Liberty, to the Phnom Penh courthouse that would announce her verdict, she recorded a defiant video message: “This autocratic regime wants to stop you from breathing,” she said. “This autocratic regime wants to imprison freedom.”

In July 2023, Seng went on a 10-day hunger strike in prison to bring further attention to the plight of political prisoners in Cambodia and protest the country’s elections. After her hunger strike concluded, Seng released the following statement:

"I went on a hunger strike not only to call for my freedom, but for the freedom of all Cambodians. Even while my body was at its weakest, I remained incredibly determined and now feel 1,000 times stronger for this righteous cause.  The regime cannot knock us down and we will not be silenced. I am incredibly grateful to those sharing my message. Please continue to raise awareness about the plight of political prisoners and the fall of democracy in Cambodia. The international community must speak out about these injustices."

Arrested at gunpoint, interrogated relentlessly, tortured brutally, sentenced excessively, beaten violently—and yet, Tsi Conrad’s voice is heard loud and clear beyond the prison walls at Kondengui Central Prison in Cameroon. 

On December 8, 2016, while filming a protest where the authorities reportedly shot live rounds at protesters in the Northwest Region capital of Bamenda, Tsi Conrad found himself surrounded by at least 10 military officers, there to arrest him on anti-state charges. At gunpoint, the officers destroyed Conrad’s camera and hauled him off—first to the Bamenda judicial police station for several hours of interrogation, then to the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance in Yaoundé, where he was reportedly tortured into giving a false confession. 

Eighteen months later, following a seemingly interminable military court trial on charges including rebellion, civil war, and destruction of public property, Conrad was found guilty of terrorism, secession, hostility against the state, contempt for civil authority, rebellion, and spreading false news, including by electronic means, and sentenced to 15 years in Kondengui Central Prison. 

Conrad, however, is not so easily silenced. 

Though arrested for his work as a freelance journalist, Conrad is, by nature and profession, a creator—a screenwriter, director, editor, actor, documentarian, event producer, talent promoter, and poet. Throughout his incarceration, Conrad has been using his poetic talents to reach out to the world from which he was torn that balmy December morning in Bamenda. 

In the summer of 2019, amid inmate protests at Kondengui Central Prison calling for fairer treatment and better living conditions, Conrad published his poem “The Boycott” in the protest poetry anthology Cendres et mémoires (Ashes and Memories). The inmates’ peaceful demonstrations were reportedly met with kidnappings and violent beatings in an unnamed facility, leaving Conrad with a head injury, a charge of “resistance,” and the addition of 18 months to his sentence. 

Independent, fact-based journalism that holds the powerful to account is both foundational to democracy and one of its greatest defenses. Repressive regimes rightly consider independent journalists a threat—and over the past several years, press freedom has been recognized as one of the most-threatened rights globally. For months prior to his arrest, Conrad had been harassed by the Cameroonian authorities for his journalistic work, which included reporting on antigovernment protests in the country’s English-speaking region. 

As is the case with most journalists who find themselves arbitrarily detained, it was not just Conrad's person the authorities wanted to confine—it was also his voice. His imprisonment has left a vacuum not only for his immediate family, but for the community at large. Hundreds of young people who look up to him now find themselves without their coach, mentor, and director in the midst of the crisis in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest regions.  

Conrad has maintained an online presence since his incarceration, and has gained notice due to his status as a political prisoner. However, politics are far from the only thing he chooses to share about online: Conrad is a poet and an artist, and he has refused to be defined solely by his imprisonment.    

The very first post on his Facebook page, published more than two years into his imprisonment, is not about the injustice that he faces, the political tensions that set the stage for this injustice, or global threats to free expression. Rather, it was a heartfelt and encouraging message to struggling members of Cameroon’s artistic and entertainment community, assuring them that even entertainers who don’t feel they’ve achieved “the three dreams of every entertainer (money, fame, stardom)” are “the true versions of perseverance” and are “next in the line on that ladder of success.” 

Through these official channels, Conrad has shared his hopes, reflected on his faith, celebrated his fellow artists and activists, considered the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, publicized the shows he produced and directed in Bamenda prior to his arrest, mourned his mother on the tenth anniversary of her death, and thanked his supporters and loved ones. 

Though Conrad remains active on social media, sharing inspirational sentiments and messages of support for the people of Bamenda, the reality of his situation remains stark.  

In Conrad’s own words, shared in December of 2020: 

“Four years in the dungeons of la République du Cameroun has not broken me nor changed my resolve to fight for a country that will respect its lowest citizens. It has, rather, strengthened my desire to hold the mantle of freedom firmly until the finish line. Ambazonia will be free.” 

In July 2021, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Conrad’s imprisonment was indeed arbitrary, and called for his immediate release and a full and independent investigation into his case. Advocacy groups, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), have been working even before the ruling to push for his release, and have since attempted to use it report as leverage to chisel away at his sentence. At the time of writing, Conrad remained behind the walls of Kondengui Central Prison.