Silenced

It's the 23 February 2022 and investigative journalist Anna Myroniuk is at home in Ukraine's capital Kiev, watching history unfold. President Putin has taken to the airwaves, delivering an address which any Ukrainian would immediately recognise as a declaration of war. For months there had been troop build ups and a steady drum of warnings that Russia was about to invade. Then, only a couple of ho...

It's 2011 and a spark has been lit, the Arab Spring sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, toppling despotic regimes one by one. In the Syrian capital Damascus, journalist Ali Al-Ibrahim is studying for a master’s degree at university when the protests reach the surrounding streets. It was a hopeful moment, that something might be about to change. Then the government of President Bashar...

Today the Wagner Group is known to many for the role it played in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But in 2018, when Nigerian journalist Philip Obaji Jr began to investigate their activities in Africa, the group was still largely unknown. What Philip discovered was human rights atrocities on an unimaginable scale. In central and west Africa, the Wagner Group was exploiting the natural resources to fu...

On 15 August 2021, veteran journalist Sanjar Sohail watched in horror as the Afghan capital Kabul fell to the Taliban once again.  Though he was safe at his home in Canada, Sanjar was responsible for a network of reporters across Afghanistan. Fifteen years earlier, he had set up Hasht-e-Subh. The media outlet had gained notoriety for its investigative reporting, pioneering a new type of journalism...

Though few people are aware, Vietnam now ranks at the bottom of all major global press indexes, its freedom of expression considered only slightly better than China and North Korea.  In the midst of the global pandemic, a prominent author and journalist, Pham Doan Trang, was arrested on trumped-up charges of anti-state propaganda. She now faces nine years in prison. In this episode, Nicola speaks...

For many years, Brazilian investigative journalist Juliana Dal Piva had been a human rights reporter. But in 2019, when President Jair Bolsonaro rose to power, her attention turned towards corruption at the highest levels of government.  Her investigations were to put her on a collision course with the President’s supporters and the military and commercial elites close to him. In this episode, Jul...

On 16 September 2022, Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery was out on the streets of the Iranian capital Tehran, capturing images of protests that were soon to sweep around the world. Days before, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old girl from Kurdistan, had been arrested by Iran’s morality police, accused of not wearing her headscarf properly. Shortly after that, news emerged that Mahsa had died in police...

Though it rarely makes news headlines, in the Southern Caucasus a geopolitical battle is underway. Georgia is locked between democracy - with closer ties to Europe - and authoritarianism, with the Russian bear looming ever larger. It all started in April 2024, when a new law was introduced dubbed the 'foreign agent law', which mandated that any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its f...

On 29 March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was on a field trip in the Ural mountains of Russia when he was arrested on spurious charges of espionage. Russia’s FSB - the successor to the Soviet-era KGB - had accused Evan of attempting to obtain classified information about a large military industrial complex, charging him with spying; charges the Journal, the US government and...

With western media outlets dubbing the conflict in Sudan a “forgotten war”, what role do journalists play in making sure the world doesn’t look away? On the morning of 15 April 2023, Al Jazeera’s Sudan correspondent Hiba Morgan was up early, preparing to head out on a reporting trip northwest of the capital Khartoum.  There had been something in the air for months; a sense that a feud between two...

In the early hours of 7 October 2023, news rolled in which was a completely different scale to anything Israeli photojournalist Oren Ziv had ever covered before. He grabbed his cameras and headed south to the border villages. Not long after that, he and his colleagues came under fire from Hamas militants who had broken through the border wall. Later, Oren visited the site of the Nova music festiva...

How do you report on a war when the war is at home? In this episode host Nicola Kelly speaks to Al Jazeera Gaza correspondent Youmna ElSayed.  Youmna describes the challenges of reporting on the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's devastating bombardment of the beseiged Gaza Strip in the months that have followed. She sets out the personal and professional costs of covering the war, the impa...

In a new season of 'Silenced', host Nicola Kelly speaks to journalists around the world who have risked it all to report the truth.  In episode one, Nicola speaks to Youmna El-Sayed, Gaza correspondent for Al-Jazeera, about the Hamas attacks on October 7 2023 and Israel's ongoing bombardment of the Gaza strip. How do you report on a war when the war is at home? Future episodes include: - Oren Ziv,...

Alex Chow, a prominent leader of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, describes the fight for democracy, his incarceration and life in exile. The Umbrella Movement of 2014 saw scores of people occupying main squares around the city, putting up umbrellas to protect themselves against the pepper spray police used to disperse the crowds. Then, in 2019, pro-democracy protests against a controversial extradi...

Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist and the founder of Rukhshana Media, Afghanistan's first female-led media organisation, speaks to Nicola about the day the Taliban retook Kabul; being airlifted to safety; and what it's like running a media organisation while living in exile. Host: Nicola Kelly Producer: Christopher Hooton Music: Julian Wharton Sound design: Rick Morris To find out more about ARTICL...

Renowned Mexican journalist and academic Sergio Aguayo tells Nicola about the impact a civil defamation lawsuit has had on his personal and professional life. It all started in 2016 when Aguayo wrote an opinion piece, accusing former Coahuila state governor Humberto Moreira of corruption. In a case that rumbled on for more than six years, Sergio was ordered to pay 10 million pesos - that’s more th...

On the second of October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, arguably Saudi Arabia’s most prominent journalist and an outspoken critic of the country’s government, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect documents he needed to get married. But he never reappeared. Investigators later concluded that Jamal Khashoggi had been ambushed, forcibly restrained, drugged and asphyxiated. His body was then...

Matthew Caruana Galizia , journalist and son of the late investigative journalist Daphne Caruana-Galizia, speaks to Nicola about the day of his mother's murder and his determination to continue her legacy, exposing corruption among Malta's elite. Host: Nicola Kelly Producer: Chris Hooton Music: Julian Wharton Sound design: Rick Morris To find out more about ARTICLE 19's work, visit www.article19.o...

Former Editor-in-Chief of 'Russia Today' (now 'RT') tells Nicola about her years in activism, her decision to join the state-run TV network and why she quit after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February. Maria describes the threats, intimidation and violent attacks against her and her hopes for a free and independent Russian media. To learn more about ARTICLE 19's work, visit our website .

Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk speaks to Nicola from a bomb shelter in the west of the country.  She describes the tentacles of the Russian propaganda machine and the sophisticated disinformation war that has been waged in Ukraine since 2014; journalist safety, including the deliberate targeting of journalists and those killed, kidnapped and disappeared; and how best to get impartial informati...

Nicola speaks to Richard Ratcliffe, campaigner and husband of British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in one of the last interviews before his wife's release. He recounts the day she was arrested, the confused first months, the conditions in which Nazanin was held and the politics that surrounded her six-year imprisonment in Iran. 'Silenced' is hosted by human rights journalist N...