PEN International launches Emergency Assistance, its policy dialogue on the need to protect writers in times of crisis
“….writers are not only expected to report what is on the ground, but they can extract meanings, the unseen, the hidden oppression and they bring to the public something to ruminate on.” Awet Fissehaye, Executive Director of PEN Eritrea in Exile
25 September 2024: Today PEN International releases its report, Emergency Assistance: The Challenges in Ensuring the Safety of Writers in Times of Crisis. This policy dialogue illustrates the spectrum of challenges PEN International has faced in assisting writers forced to flee from their homes in countries such as Afghanistan, Belarus, Eritrea, and Nicaragua.
The launch of Emergency Assistance comes at a critical moment as repression targeted at writers – as well as many other civil society actors – intensifies, and the brunt of authoritarianism deepens worldwide. Writers who, like their journalist and human rights defender peers, are being persecuted and similarly face exile, imprisonment, harassment or even death for exercising their writerly expression. However, unlike other at-risk groups, they lack access to necessary and timely protections.
In doing this critical work, PEN International has collaborated with its PEN Centres, through a spectrum of institutional responses including, en masse evacuation, individual emergency assistance as well as relocation. Its partnership with the independently run PEN Emergency Fund, plays a critical role in these efforts. These efforts are also supported by PEN International’s collaboration with PEN OPP, an online platform providing a literary space for authors to explore how displacement has shaped the survival of diverse literature.
Writers Samay Hamed (PEN Afghanistan President), Marko Vidojković (Serbia), Awet Fissehaye (Executive Director of PEN Eritrea in Exile), Gioconda Belli (former President of PEN Nicaragua), and Taciana Niadbaj (PEN Belarus President), will offer first-hand insights into the dangers they have faced, during ‘Writers in a World at War’: PEN International’s 90th Congress in Oxford, UK (24-27 September 2024). Their participation underscores the importance of collective action in consistently defending the right to freedom of expression. In resisting authoritarianism, Emergency Assistance documents how displaced writers have subsequently exercised their literary agency and established active and agile hubs for advocacy.
Our policy dialogue, Emergency Assistance stresses the need for better international mechanisms to protect writers at risk. The organisation calls on the global community to reassess its responsibilities under human rights law and standards, as well as the adaption and extension of established mechanisms to better safeguard writers at risk.
Note to editors:
For media inquiries or to arrange interviews with Belli, Hamed, Vidojković, Fissehaye, or Niadbaj, please contact Sabrina Tucci, PEN International Communications and Campaigns Manager, at Sabrina.Tucci@pen-international.org