The climate crisis is changing the way nations think about food, energy, resources, war and peace. Melting ice caps are opening up new trade routes fought over by the world's great powers, conflicts are waged over food and mineral resources, shifting climates are fuelling migration – and Donald Trump says it's all just a scam.

Join Arthur Snell as he discusses his new book Elemental: the new geography of climate change and how we survive it. Spanning conflict in the Sahel, Russia's war in Ukraine, the US coveting Greenland, NEOM in Saudi Arabia, and China's energy push, Snell explores how the climate crisis is now in every part of our politics. But while there is much to concern us here, there's hope too. The world faces various futures, and it can adapt and respond to the realities of a changing climate.

Buy Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive it

https://uk.bookshop.org/a/8711/9781035412945

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Chapters: 

00:00 Introduction

01:20 The Petro-State Panic: Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the End of Oil

03:32 The Sahel Crisis: Climate Migration and Fragile States

08:24 Uranium & Mercenaries: Russia vs. France in Africa

10:25 The Arctic: Melting Ice, Shipping Routes, and Donald Trump

16:21 Ukraine: Why Putin is Weaponizing Food and Farmland

21:35 China’s Monopoly & Russia's Future as an "Economic Colony"

28:18 The Surprising Winners: Morocco, Interconnectors, and Climate Hope

32:41 Outro

Credits: Presented by Sian Norris

Audio engineering by James Battershill

Theme song ‘Odyssey’ performed by Edward Abela

In researching my book Seeking Sexual Freedom, I was struck by the contrast between the expansive ways our ancestors understood gender, sexuality and intimacy, and the growing restrictions being shaped today by religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and political power.

I think of these restrictions – often described as a “backlash” – as an interruption.

Across the continent, we have centuries of knowledge that speak to fluidity in our gods and goddesses, and to a multiplicity of family structures and ways of being. The current moment – marked by rising homophobia and the rollback of progressive rights across Africa and beyond – sits uneasily against that longer history.

But interruptions are not the whole story. The power of people – feminists and queer movements – is also co-creating, building and dreaming new worlds where we can all be free.

The extract below explores that tension.

Take the Xaxars in Senegal – a community gathering that, in the past, would have been joyously explicit, obscene even, as women, men, and children sang about sexual acts that they would want to experience with their betrothed. Those traditional spaces provided opportunities to learn about sex and to celebrate the pleasure and joy of it. At the time, discussions about sex and sexuality happened in the open, to the chants of the bongo man, and with the participation of entire communities, whether people were married or not.

But, like many other African countries, Senegal has become increasingly religious and conservative. Muslim leaders have denounced Xaxars, and so now, as my Senegalese friend Hawa explained, even when these gatherings do happen, they are a much tamer version of what our ancestors experienced. They now occur post-consummation of the marriage, thereby nullifying the spirit and power in speaking openly, honestly, and explicitly before sex is presumed to have taken place.

That sense of freedom afforded by sexual knowledge was interrupted by the triple forces of colonisation, racism, and patriarchy. While I am buoyed by knowing that traditional African systems of knowledge, and many indigenous rites, rituals, and traditions still exist—and are being practised in the here and now – I wanted to explore how they have been irrevocably changed and transformed by systemic racist hetero-patriarchy.

My soul is lifted by knowing how, as a people, we have survived colonialism. Afro-descendants in the Diaspora have also preserved within their very beings ancient African knowledge and practices, in spite of centuries of enslavement and forced migration across the Atlantic and beyond. This became clear to me during my time in Bahia – seeing familiar foods sold on the street corners, being in the Candomblé temple and seeing people fall into trance, much like they do at traditional religious events across the African continent.

The concept of sankofa reminds us that we can always return to the source. Going back does not mean returning to a mythical, imagined Utopia. It means a return to those aspects of our histories that best serve us, and in the context of African and Black sexualities, it means a return to the creation of intentional space to talk openly, honestly, even obscenely about sex and sexualities in all their diversity.

Going back does not mean returning to a mythical, imagined Utopia. It means a return to those aspects of our histories that best serve us

On the African continent today, 31 countries out of 54 have banned consensual same-sex relationships, over 50% of the population describes themselves as Christian, and just over 30% identify as Muslim.

This high level of religiosity in and of itself is not inherently bad, but it becomes a problem when conservative religious leaders wield formidable political power and threaten politicians, forcing them to pass legislation that restricts the autonomy of women over their own bodies, or advocate against the passage of bills that are fundamental for women’s reproductive health.

My first visit to Sierra Leone was in 2022. I had been invited to be a keynote speaker at the 10th All Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights. One of the special guests was President Julius Maada Bio. When he addressed the gathering of activists, civil society leaders, and policymakers, he stated, “My government has unanimously approved a safe motherhood bill. This bill will include a range of critical provisions to ensure the health and dignity of all girls and women of reproductive age in this country.”

The hall in which we stood when the president made his announcement erupted into loud applause at his words, and in that moment it felt like we were winning. We the activists, we the feminists, we the people who want girls and women to live boldly and not die from backstreet abortions or as a result of female genital mutilation. We were invigorated by how boldly the president had made this announcement. He had stated categorically that this was a unanimous decision of his government. Later I shook the president’s hand when he attended a private dinner with a number of the conference speakers. I wondered quietly if he was the real deal, an African leader who would stand up for the rights of girls and women. The Sierra Leonean activists in the room had felt hopeful; it had been a long road to get to the stage where the long-fought bill had presidential approval.

However, when I returned to the country three years later, the bill had still not been passed. Sierra Leonean feminists informed me that this was because of lobbying by far-right religious extremists, who were part of a coalition called the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone.

Although the president was firmly in favour of passing the bill, its passage was still up in the air, like a ball held in suspense by forces of hate. In a context where even presidents cannot get legislation passed, you know we are in deep trouble. This trouble is not limited to Sierra Leone.

I see the same politics play out in my own country, Ghana, where religious leaders are mobilising with politicians to pass an anti-gay bill. The religious fervour that drives the bid to control women’s bodies is on the same spectrum as the hate that Queer people across Africa face.

On the African continent today, to the detriment of universal human rights, extreme religiosity now drives the political agenda in countries that are supposedly secular. The roots of the religiosity that shape much of politics in Africa today are in colonisation.

Colonialism did not only force new laws on Africans, it reshaped social and cultural norms. In the case of Christianity, the religious tradition that I am most familiar with, missionaries came carrying the Bible in one hand while clearing the path for military operations and the takeover of land, minerals, and wealth with the other.

Colonialism did not only force new laws on Africans, it reshaped social and cultural norms.

In former British colonies, like my own country, they did this while also promoting Victorian notions of respectability and demonising African traditional religions. Africans did not just give in to these assaults on their culture and way of life. There were many fierce battles between the colonisers and the Indigenous people of the land they sought to conquer.

The legendary queen mother Yaa Asantewaa, who led the last war between the Asante and the British in 1900, is famous for having said, “If you, the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls on the battlefield.”

Today, the fight against colonisation is not just physical, it’s cultural. It’s about going back to being a society that is truly tolerant of all religions, including African traditional religions, and respecting the rights of Africans who have no particular faith.

Resisting colonisation is also about recognising that the majority of Africans desire to live under civil, not religious, law.

Resisting colonisation is not just about fighting the physical assault of colonising and neo-colonising forces, but resisting its more insidious elements, which includes the centuries of messaging we have been fed about the inferiority of Blackness. This requires a radical commitment to love ourselves as Africans, including a celebration of our physicality, those very features which racism told us were ugly, unattractive, and less-than.

Copyright © 2026 by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah. From the book SEEKING SEXUAL FREEDOM by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, published by One Signal/Atria, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc and Dialogue Books, an imprint of John Murray Group. Printed by permission.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seeking-Sexual-Freedom/Nana-Darkoa-Sekyiamah/9781668209684

At a moment of intensifying backlash against rights and bodily autonomy globally, movements are being forced to adapt fast – often with little space to reflect on what is actually working.

Much of the media that covers activism still flattens that work into individual stories or neat 'wins', even as organisers themselves push back on those framings.

This Q&A is part of openDemocracy’s effort to do something different: to treat movements not just as subjects of coverage, but as sources of knowledge – and to surface the practical thinking behind how organisers are navigating risk, building power and learning across contexts in real time.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is an African feminist writer and activist, and author of Seeking Sexual Freedom. She is also an award winning podcaster, and curates festivals focused on African sexualities. She is passionate about co-creating community spaces where African women document and share their experiences of sex, sexuality and pleasure, building a collective archive in contexts where these conversations are often silenced.

Here, she reflects on what it means to organise through what she calls an 'interruption' – and how movements can draw on longer histories of resistance to shape what comes next.

What does it mean, in practice, to learn from the past when organising today?

In my new book, I draw on the concept of Sankofa – an Akan principle from Ghana, where I’m from. It’s something I’ve always known, and it translates loosely as ‘go back and get it’, or learning from the past to inform the future. For me, that is the foundation for how I think about liberation, memory, and what movements need to build on.

In practice terms, Sankofa is an act of decolonial reclamation. We must know our histories so that we can actively build on the foundations laid by previous generations of activists to ensure we aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel. For me, as a writer, building an archive is a political act. It counters the colonial erasure that tries to tell us we have no history of resistance. By documenting our lives, we ensure that future movements have a floor to stand on, rather than a void to fill.

In the extract, you describe the current moment as an 'interruption' rooted in colonial histories. How should movements think about that legacy in how they organise and frame their work?

If we view the colonial project as a permanent state, our organizing becomes defensive. But when we name it as an 'Interruption’, we reclaim the timeline. Movements should frame their work as a continuation of a much older, eons-long story of African agency and bodily autonomy. This shifts the goal from 'protesting the state' to 'reimagining our realities and futures.' It also allows us to organize from a place of infinite possibility.

This was the most depressing part of my research to be honest. The colonial mindset came with very puritanical ideas about sex, the body, and the role of women in society. In many cases it displaced more expansive practices. In Senegal for instance, I learnt about the Xarxar (pronounced ‘hah’) where, ahead of wedding ceremonies, traditional griots led chants where people sang about what they wanted their lovers to do with them. This was intentionally done so people could learn about sex before getting married. Today, Xarxars are criticized as unIslamic, and even when they still happen, they take place after the formal marriage has taken place. In general, it has become a much milder version than the traditional risqué and spirited ceremony.

In places where speaking about sex or sexuality carries real risk, what have you seen that helps people navigate that in practice?

When your very existence and identity carries risk, the act of being 'fully human' is an act of defiance. I’ve also seen movements move beyond mere identity and association toward deep community care. This means building support networks that provide not just solidarity, but physical, legal, and digital protection. It’s about creating 'liberated zones' where we can speak our truths safely while we work to shift the broader landscape. I also do this personally in community with others through the sex positive festivals I have co-organised in Ghana, Kenya and soon Benin.

It's a daily practice. I was raised as a Christian, and with that came a fear of African traditional religions (ATRs) which I was taught through popular culture - and negative portrayals on screen in particular - were demonic. What I only came to realize recently, and have confirmed through my research, is how ATRs have always held space for more complexity when it comes to gender and sexuality.

Across the book, you move between very different contexts on the Continent. What feels shared across struggles, and what doesn’t always translate across countries or movements?

The shared thread is tireless creativity, and the ability to pivot from street protests against finance bills in Kenya or Galamasey (illegal mining) in Ghana and festivals to intimate, subversive spaces like speakeasies. However, we must still confront the colonial infrastructure that still divides us, like the language barriers between Anglophone and Francophone Africa. I recently travelled with a feminist friend from Ghana to Benin, and she was deeply moved by hearing Ewe all around her on the journey, including through Togo, the country through which we transited. This was yet another reminder that our existing borders are artificial, and our indigenous and existing connections predate and will outlast those interruptions. Our movements must actively work to dismantle these artificial silos.

In the face of growing backlash against rights and bodily autonomy, what has kept you going – and what moments of resistance or change have stayed with you?

What keeps me going is seeing the 'interruption' being actively pushed back. The fact that trans people in Benin have successfully navigated the state to change gender markers on national IDs is a monumental win. It proves that even within systems designed to exclude us, we are finding cracks. I write about this in Seeking Sexual Freedom because we need to celebrate these moments of tangible change. They are proof that the future we are building is already here.

In July 2024, a 17-year-old stabbed 13 people, killing three girls, in a dance studio in Southport, in the north-west of England. Fueled by misinformation about the incident in the aftermath, rioters clashed with police and attacked a local mosque. Anti-immigration protests and riots spread across the UK in the days that followed.

On Monday, the UK government released the first phase of its inquiry report examining the event. While the report says that the “perpetrator’s responsibility is absolute” – he pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment – it considers a range of other factors and failings that surrounded the event and its aftermath. That includes the role of the internet and tech platforms, including, in particular, X and Amazon.

Social media and online content

The report looks deeply at the events that preceded the attack, including a timeline of the attacker’s social media use and consumption of violent material on platforms such as YouTube before the stabbings.

It addresses what it calls the “inaction” of his parents, who described noticing and worrying about their son’s weapons and behaviour. It details how the assailant looked at violent content at school, including information about sexual violence, torture, wars and bombings, and was referred to the UK’s counter-terrorism unit, with no effective results.

“I remain concerned that individual schools may lack the technical knowledge to assess whether they have appropriate filtering systems in place,” noted the chair of the inquiry.

The report notes that while his school blocked his access to the internet, the perpetrator attempted to override it, which was not reported to the unit. There was “little curiosity around how he was spending his time” from those around him, according to the report, even as age-verification and other restrictions on his online activity appeared to fail.

The report names Elon Musk’s X as a platform implicated with furthering the tragedy, and notes that “X has shown no signs of any self-critical reflection” of how its policies contributed to these events, including its age verification processes. The report says that X was not as cooperative with the inquiry as other platforms, refusing to provide posts associated with the attacker’s account.

“X did not show the same ready willingness to co-operate with the Inquiry as almost all other organisations and Core Participants,” notes the report.

After the stabbings, the UK’s home secretary and secretary of state for its Department for Science, Innovation and Technology wrote a letter to platforms, including X, asking them to take harmful materials accessed by the perpetrator, such as an al-Qaida training manual and the video of the stabbing, down. TikTok and Meta complied and expressed condolences, while X did neither, stating that the “content reported has not been found to be in violation of the X Terms of Service.” The report acknowledges that “UK law currently permits it to act in this way.”

The report includes the fact that the perpetrator viewed a video of a high-profile stabbing on X, a video that the platform refused to take down. The report notes that he would have been able to view this video due to weak age verification restrictions at the time, which only required a user to voluntarily enter their date of birth. Although he was able to bypass Instagram’s age-verification measures, “there is no evidence” that he was able to view similarly violent content, according to the report.

In the days that followed, X also came under fire along with other social media platforms for facilitating the spread of misinformation that led to riots after the attack, including claims that the perpetrator was Muslim and a migrant, neither of which was true. Researchers at the time noted that X’s recommendation algorithms helped amplify posts spreading misinformation.

The stabbings came less than two years after X dismantled its Trust and Safety advisory group following its acquisition at the end of 2022 by Musk. The platform’s methods of self-regulation were described as too slow to stop the spread of misinformation.

“X clearly has a different understanding of what its corporate responsibilities are,” said Owen Bennett, former head of international online safety at Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. This “should be a cause for concern for Ofcom and the UK government,” he told Tech Policy Press.

While the report’s “focus on legal but harmful content is important, … the fundamental issue with X is its platform design,” wrote Amnesty’s head of big tech accountability, Alia Al Ghussain, over email.

The UK’s Online Safety Act and other regulatory frameworks “need to be robustly enforced to mitigate the effects of this design, and to ensure that there is meaningful accountability,” said Al Ghussain. “This includes addressing the remaining gaps in current legislation to enable the UK government to hold X accountable for harms stemming from its algorithmic design.”

The report makes a case for more effective filtering in schools, and suggests an extension,  such as through an amendment, to the Online Safety Act to safeguard against age-inappropriate content to children and prevent the viewing of violent content. It acknowledges the argument that the Act should be given “time to take effect before considering the introduction of new or amended legislative requirements,” but expresses concerns about VPNs and recommends age verification for VPNs.

Amazon and the “arsenal” of weapons

The report examines how the perpetrator was able to accumulate an “arsenal” of weapons, and his ability to purchase the items he intended to use as weapons – from knives to the ingredients for poison – from online retailers including Amazon. It notes that while Amazon’s policies restrict children from making purchases, “there was and is no age verification process when opening an Amazon account.” 

“It is concerning that someone with that [violent] mindset was able to browse such dangerous items and … purchase items that could be used as weapons without any age restriction,” notes the report.

The report recommends that Amazon improve its age verification, including taking offline steps such as training its drivers around age-verified deliveries, as well as mandatory reporting and information sharing from knife vendors for suspicious behaviour. The report also urges a police investigation into another online vendor for allegedly failing to carry out age verification in the sale of machetes and knives.

It also recommends that senior coroners and statutory inquiries should be given greater access to the social media accounts of perpetrators who are deceased.

Tech Policy Press sought comment from X and Amazon, but received no reply at the time of publication.

“Vindication” for the Online Safety Act?

The report is a “vindication” for the policies of Online Safety Act, a wide-ranging effort to regulate online platforms that was launched at the end of 2023, according to Bennett. Although the Act had been launched at the time of the stabbings, it was still being put into force.

This case shows the need at the time for regulation of age-inappropriate material, said Bennett, calling the platforms’ self-declaration measures at time “woefully ineffective.”

“While the [Online Safety Act] couldn't have prevented this tragedy from occurring, its importance and relevance has been vindicated,” said Bennett.

“It is unrealistic to expect regulation to make this impossible for those that are determined to access such material,” wrote Henry Tuck, senior director of digital policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, over email.

The report did not address how the perpetrator originally encountered violent material: “was this through unwanted exposure on a mainstream platform, or did he actively seek it out?” said Tuck. “Rather than preventing all means of accessing such content, a more realistic expectation from regulation would be to significantly reduce the risks of incidental exposure to illegal and harmful content.”

The report’s second phase, which is slated to be released next year, will deal more heavily with the influence of the internet and social media and the efficacy of existing laws.

• This piece was originally published on Tech Policy Press. Jade-Ruyu Yan is a UK reporting fellow at openDemocracy and Tech Policy Press.

• This piece was originally published by Agencia Publica, and has been translated and edited by openDemocracy

As night fell on Rio de Janeiro on 13 March 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart, known as Jango, addressed a crowd gathered at Brazil’s Central Station to announce measures that would change the course of the country’s history.

His speech, focused on restricting the profits that foreign companies in Brazil could send abroad and promising agrarian reform, resonated not just in the streets, but also in the offices of Brasília, at the headquarters of foreign corporations in the country and in the corridors of Washington.

Goulart also spoke about religion and politics. Days earlier in the city of Belo Horizonte in south-east Brazil, the Labour Party’s federal deputy and the president’s brother-in-law, Leonel Brizola, had been prevented from speaking by a group of women brandishing rosaries as shields against what they saw as a communist threat.

“The rosaries of faith must not be raised against the people,” Goulart warned in his speech at the Central de Brasil.

The response to his warning would come less than a week later, not in the form of silent prayers, but in the roar of half a million people marching through the streets of São Paulo city on the afternoon of 19 March, the feast day of St Joseph, patron saint of the family.

The March of the Family with God for Freedom, a name suggested by the nun Ana de Lurdes, who considered it “an act of faith in a time of darkness”, began in Praça da República at four in the afternoon and proceeded towards Praça da Sé, a square at the heart of São Paulo, dominated by the city’s neo-Gothic cathedral.

The demonstrators carried banners that combined religious devotion with visceral anti-communism: “Our Lady of Aparecida, enlighten the reactionaries”, “Red only on lipstick”, “Green and yellow, no hammer and sickle”.

What appeared to be a spontaneous demonstration by concerned believers was, in fact, the result of a much more complex organisation and came together within a context of intense political polarisation, says Janaína Cordeiro, who studied the activities of conservative women’s groups during that period as part of her PhD in History at the Federal University of Fluminense.

“The first march took place in São Paulo and was conceived as an act of reparation for the rosary, which had allegedly been offended by Jango at the rally in Central de Brasil on 13 March,” Cordeiro explains.

These women – middle-class housewives and primary school teachers – organised themselves quickly. “They were mainly housewives and, if they had a profession, it was linked to care work, which by then had been considered a female domain.”

It took just five days to organise the march, which was backed by figures such as federal MP Antônio Sílvio da Cunha Bueno of the Social Democratic Party and the deputy governor of São Paulo, Laudo Natel. Meanwhile, São Paulo governor Adhemar de Barros was raising funds from the business community at the headquarters of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo to equip the security forces and ensure order during the event.

Ultimately, the march helped to bring down Goulart’s government, having demonstrated the public support for the military coup that would depose him less than two weeks later. Yet documents and the testimony of former US Central Intelligence Agency agent Philip Agee indicate that this march, and the others that followed in the days after, were not only organised at a grassroots level by housewives, but had the backing of the CIA itself.

The CIA not only allegedly provided funds to some of the organisers – including the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action, the Institute for Social Research and Studies, the Women’s Campaign for Democracy, the Fraternal Urban and Rural Friendship, and the Brazilian Rural Society – but is said to have helped to plan the demonstrations. Brazil’s business sector is also thought to have funded some of these groups.

A document on the family marches compiled by Rodrigues Matias and published by the magazine Caros Amigos in 2002 states that “João Batista Leopoldo de Figueiredo, president of the Institute for Social Research and Studies, was one of the key figures in organising the movement”.

​The ‘CIA priest’

​The story of an Irish priest who believed he had been saved by a miracle also explains how faith became a tool of US foreign policy.

Patrick Peyton, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, an international congregation of the Catholic Church, contracted tuberculosis during his priestly training in the United States. When he recovered, he attributed his salvation to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and the Rosary. From then on, Peyton dedicated his life to promoting a transnational devotional movement, the Family Rosary Crusade, which would become one of the most sophisticated instruments of US influence in Latin America during the Cold War.

The priest produced films and radio programmes to spread devotion to the Rosary. In 1962, when he arrived in Brazil, his Family Rosary Crusade became a vehicle for far-reaching political mobilisation against communism.

There, the Crusade was not led by men in suits and ties, but by women from lay Catholic groups, who opened offices in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Paraná and Belo Horizonte, and organised themselves into groups that multiplied rapidly.

The Women’s Civic Union began its activities in 1961 in São Paulo, establishing branches in the interior of the state, in Santos and other cities. In Rio de Janeiro, six months later, the Women’s Campaign for Democracy was founded, which quickly expanded its branches to other neighbourhoods and cities in the region.

But there was one crucial detail: many of the husbands, brothers and male relatives of these women were military personnel, businessmen linked to the Institute for Social Research and Studies and Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action, or executives of multinational corporations.

Janaína Cordeiro points out that, although women played a very strong and important leadership role in that context, these other organisations were also fundamental. “They relied on what was known at the time as the ‘productive classes’; they relied on sectors of the business community; they relied on some organised trade unions that also called for the march; they relied on other churches besides the Catholic Church.”

Although the Marches of the Family with God and Freedom were led by the women’s groups, not the Family Rosary Crusade, they supported the Crusade, which fuelled anti-communist rhetoric against Jango.

Historian Isabella Villarinho Pereyra, who holds a PhD from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, highlights the central role that this religious organisation played in the 1964 coup.

“The marches served as a kind of collective catharsis for this group of women, who had a very specific agenda: to save Brazil from communism,” explains Pereyra. In this context, “a narrative of a battle waged against communism not only on the military front, but also on the spiritual front”.

The rosary was not merely a religious symbol. It was the only weapon able to save the country. “The women who marched believed they were drawing on every possible form of support, mobilising not only faith but also the media, parishes, masses and the structure of the Catholic Church,” notes Pereyra.

That the CIA funded the marches’ organisers was no coincidence; a connection between the Family Rosary Crusade and the intelligence service was established by Peter Grace, an American businessman whose chemicals company, W R Grace & Co, had operations in Brazil and throughout Latin America. Grace was a personal friend of the then CIA director, Alan Dulles, and “a devout Catholic”, Pereyra says.

Grace met Father Peyton on a boat trip to Europe and, impressed by his work in spreading the faith, became his main financier and, more importantly, his intermediary with the US intelligence services. It was he who proposed bringing the Crusades movement to Latin America, an initiative that received support from both the CIA and the Vatican.

One of the most revealing documents from Pereyra’s investigation shows that Grace mentioned the need for a meeting between Father Peyton and the CIA, demonstrating that the connection between religion, the business world and US intelligence was neither informal nor accidental.

The Vatican was then facing two challenges in Latin America: a shortage of clergy and the rise of left-wing movements. The convergence of religious interests and US geopolitical objectives gave rise to an alliance in Brazil in which funding came from Washington, whilst the public face was religious.

The clergy, through archbishops and bishops, facilitated contact with the faithful, the movement’s fundamental support base.

The invisible orchestration

According to Pereyra’s research, the CIA not only provided funding for the marches – it even determined where they should be directed.

“Every time they arrived in a town, dinners were organised with business leaders and the media. Links were established with trade and industrial associations, and numerous letters were sent,” he explains.

The funding did not come solely from the CIA. Major US corporations and Brazilian businessmen also contributed funds. The Alliance for Progress, a US economic cooperation programme with Latin America launched in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, served as an additional channel for funding.

There was a narrative that permeated all the campaigns, a phrase that appeared in documents of the time: “The real revolution was made by your mother”. This discursive construction allowed women to exercise political power without this being recognised as such, and enabled the CIA to operate through religious and family structures, avoiding the appearance of external intervention.

According to Cordeiro, this strategy was effective: “The mobilisation legitimised the coup [of 31 March 1964], which was presented as a response to popular demand”.

The legacy of a fateful march

To understand how the Family Rosary Crusades and, later, the March of the Family with God for Freedom found fertile ground in Brazil, one must take into account the context of political polarisation that marked the beginning of the 1960s.

The Goulart government faced a powerful coalition of conservative and ultra-reactionary forces. The reforms he had proposed deeply displeased conservative sectors. Restrictions on the remittance of profits abroad affected multinational companies. Agrarian reform terrified the landowners. The mobilisation of trade unions and workers, coordinated by the General Workers’ Command, frightened the bourgeoisie.

Against this backdrop of political radicalisation, the Family Rosary Crusades offered a framework that allowed reactionary sectors to express their concerns in religious and family terms, rather than purely economic or political ones.

The historian Boris Fausto told Agência Pública in 2019 that the march demonstrated that the coup enjoyed significant social support in urban areas, particularly among the middle and upper classes, but he cautioned that “there is a huge gap between that and considering it a movement representative of society as a whole”.

The press, with rare exceptions such as Samuel Wainer’s newspaper Última Hora, played a crucial role in creating a climate of fear, amplifying the discourse of the “red menace”. O Estado de S. Paulo, for example, published the manifesto calling for the march, openly aligning itself with the conspirators.

“There was no real threat that a communist regime was going to be established,” stated Fausto. What existed was political radicalisation and a dispute over the direction of national development. The 1964 coup, far from being a mere “barracks coup”, was a civil-military alliance that took the democratic forces by surprise and established itself with absolute force. The dictatorship, which lasted until 1985, revealed the true nature of the movement.

When the Family March ended in the early evening of 19 March and the Sé Cathedral was celebrating the last mass of the day, the fate of Goulart’s government was sealed. Twelve days later, the coup would be consummated. The march had provided the civilian backing the military needed to act.

The first march in São Paulo served as the spark. In Rio de Janeiro, a march had been planned for 2 April, but the coup was brought forward to 31 March and took place on 1 April, transforming the demonstration into a ‘Victory March’. The march in Rio brought together some 800,000 people, according to the most conservative estimates, whilst in São Paulo the figure was 500,000.

Cordeiro highlights the scale of this mobilisation: “The march in Rio was the largest of them all. From then on, those marches became celebrations.” And the phenomenon spread across the country: “apparently, Brazil marched right through to September.”

The atmosphere in March 1964 was electric, historian Jacob Gorender recalled in 2017 in an interview with Agência Pública about the eve of the military coup.

Operation Brother Sam, directed by Washington, put the US Navy and Air Force in a position to intervene in Brazil should the coup face armed resistance or lead to a civil war. Direct intervention was not necessary, but the presence of the US fleet off the Brazilian coast served as a guarantee that the plan to oust Goulart would not fail. The overthrow of the legitimate government was a priority in the logic of the Cold War, in which the rhetoric of the ‘red menace’ justified the suppression of democratic freedoms.

But the enthusiasm of many participants would soon turn to disillusionment. Sectors of society that supported Goulart’s downfall, believing in a brief intervention to “restore order”, found themselves trapped in an authoritarian regime that would last 21 years.

Within four years, many of those who had marched with rosaries in their hands would be on the streets again, this time to protest against state violence. The dictatorship that followed Goulart’s presidency suppressed freedoms, decimated Parliament, and persecuted and tortured opponents, even killing them, as depicted in two films from recent years, I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent.

It is now clear that the war against Iran is going badly for Donald Trump. Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) may be determined to carry on, but Trump is the war leader in deep trouble.

So radical is this unexpected outcome that the United States may even be facing its Suez moment, like the one that saw France and the UK lose status in 1956, hastening decolonisation in the 1960s. If so, the effects of the Iran conflict could last for decades, well beyond the immediate conflict, and have impacts that change the current world order – with unpredictable consequences.

Consider the past month and a half. Iran’s theocratic leadership had been crippled by assassinations within days of the start of the assault, but leaders were quickly replaced, and the much-anticipated popular uprising simply did not happen.

Then, within a week, Trump and his ‘secretary of war’ Pete Hesgeth, claimed that the Iranian Navy had been destroyed, that its missiles and drone stocks would not last long, and whatever was left of the Army, Air Force and the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) mattered little. Moreover, they said, there was little risk of Iranian missiles, drones or strike aircraft even being able to evade Israeli or US air defences. Trump trumpeted that the Iranians were so desperate to surrender that the end of the war was only a matter of days away.

As it turned out, Trump and Hesgeth were proved wrong in almost every way.

The IRGC, especially, has confounded expectations time and time again. Missiles and armed drone stocks have been far larger than expected and fresh supplies of drones are even being made in back-street workshops across the country. Thousands of Iranians have been killed, and billions of dollars of damage have been done, but Iran survives.

Furthermore, the conflict reflects a skilfully thought-through military strategy. Targeting has repeatedly focused not on prestige sites, but on the eyes and ears of the Israeli and American military.

Early warning radars have been hit not just in Israel but across western Gulf States such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Oman. Those nations were shocked to be attacked by a presumed friendly state, but were forced to accept that by aiding the US/Israeli war effort by hosting bases, they were seen as potential enemies to Iran. As I wrote last week, the message from Tehran was: You are either with us or against us; there can be no middle way.

Hormuz is the clearest sign of how badly the war is going, but another is the lessons having to be learned by the Pentagon, which have come to light in the past few days. It has realised that it cannot fight distant wars if relying on defence systems vulnerable to cheap armed drones.

As both Ukraine and Russia are finding, satellite-based detection of missiles, drones, bombers, early warning aircraft, and other weapons of war will be the only way forward in the drone era. Because of this, the Pentagon is rushing to sort and deploy new systems as quickly as it can, having been caught out by Iranian foresight.

Another problem for the Pentagon is that the impact of this failed war will be much greater than that of the failed wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. While both those conflicts had initial domestic support after the shock of the 9/11 attacks, the war with Iran was not popular at the start and is even less so now.

The Trump White House now faces a war that it cannot win, increasing opposition at home and deepening unpopularity abroad as the world already begins to see rising inflation and the early signs of shortages as a result of the conflict.

Unlike the Suez crisis for the UK and France 70 years ago, there isn’t a more powerful figure such as Dwight Eisenhower to order the US and Israel to stop. This time, a decision to end has to come either from within the US itself or from worldwide antagonism to its dominance.

In this connection, the Lebanese ceasefire is welcome, given the thousands already killed. It is reported to have stemmed from strong US pressure on Israel, and may be part of a plan to control Netanyahu so that Trump can declare victory and withdraw US forces while he can.

If not, and this unwinnable war continues, the alternative will be a US that rapidly loses what remains of its reputation as other power bases, such as China, and a necessarily revitalised Europe without Orbán, move more into focus.

Should that happen, there will be too many consequences to draw any sound conclusions. We live in a global economy rooted for the most part in neoliberal market fundamentalism, which is currently experiencing runaway wealth at an intensity not seen for more than a century. Economic and political power is being put in the hands of a few score people with individual wealth that can match that of some states.

As the world’s richest country, the US’s weakening on the global stage would present an opportunity to change this economic system. But those ultra-wealthy billionaires, both in the US and elsewhere, will mostly work to ensure the thriving of the economic model that has benefited them so much. They will feed resources into the print and broadcast media, fund hundreds of think tanks across the world and buy political support from corruptible politicians as required.

We are in singularly uncertain times, and there is plenty of pessimism around. Even so, such uncertainty about the future means there is scope for truly innovative thinking and acting at an intensity that might not be dreamt of in ‘normal’ times. There are sound responses to all the problems and seeing the need for cooperative action and the ability to recognise wisdom are very good places to start.

“The best-case scenario is that the state captures me,” says Ángel Flores, the regional coordinator of the Indigenous Movement for the Articulation of the Struggles of the Ancestral Peoples (MILPA), one of the most vocal organisations against state mega-projects in El Salvador.

It would not be the first time MILPA’s members had been detained under El Salvador’s state of emergency, which has suspended constitutional rights and allowed police to arrest people without a judicial warrant. President Nayib Bukele’s government initially introduced the measure in 2022 after a spike in gang-related homicides. At the time, it was supposed to last 30 days, but last month entered its fourth year, having been extended dozens of times.

In this article, some of the hundreds of journalists and defenders of human and land rights have told us how their lives have changed since the state of emergency was introduced. Some remain in El Salvador, defiant in their resistance despite fearing for their and their families’ lives amid state-led persecution. Others have been forced to flee the country, fearing detention, being disappeared, or even death.

The state of emergency is just one of the many ways Bukele has tightened his grip on power by eroding democracy and the rule of law since his 2019 election. His government has passed reforms that include abolishing presidential time limits to allow him to repeatedly run for re-election, installing loyalists in courts, including the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber, and introducing measures to fast-track amendments through Parliament.

In June 2023, one of MILPA’s founders, fisherman Óscar René Martínez Iglesias, was accused of gang membership and prosecuted. Martínez Iglesias has been a vocal supporter of the local communities facing displacement for the construction of the planned Pacific Airport in La Unión, in eastern El Salvador, who have repeatedly raised questions about their homes, crops, water and state compensation.

Bukele's government denies any forced evictions, insisting land transfers were voluntary and negotiated. However, residents report protests over displacement and say compensation has been minimal and imposed rather than agreed upon.

The month after his arrest, the company Desarrollos Turísticos del Pacífico (Pacific Tourism Developments in English) began posting private property signs in mangrove areas of Icacal Beach, in Intipucá – an officially recognised Natural Protected Area in the east of the country – where community families live along the coast. The company is seeking to develop the beachfront for tourism.

To date, police have arrested six fishermen from the community, and five of them remain imprisoned. These men are among the 91,000 people arrested nationwide – more than 1.4% of the population – since 2022, according to official data.

Despite the ever-present threat of arrest, MILPA leader Flores keeps working on the lands he defends. “My personal position is not to leave the country, but to keep up the fight,” he says.

‘The iron fist’

Bukele has flatly denied his government represses or persecutes critical voices.

In September 2024, he told the UN: “In El Salvador, we do not imprison our opposition, we do not censor opinions, we do not confiscate the property of those who think differently, we do not arrest people for expressing their ideas.”

Yet last month, independent international experts warned the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the state of emergency imposed by his government has enabled arbitrary arrests, killings, torture, sexual violence, and forced disappearances that could constitute crimes against humanity.

The emergency measures were introduced after 87 people – largely ordinary civilians – were killed in one weekend in March 2022. While the government blamed the murders on rising gang violence, an investigation by local media outlet El Faro reported they were ordered by gang leaders after the alleged breakdown of a pact with the government, in which gang leaders received better prison conditions and financial benefits in exchange for lower homicide rates and electoral support. Bukele and his government have repeatedly denied the existence of such pacts.

Since then, the state of emergency has repeatedly been repeatedly renewed, and has led to more than 500 deaths in custody, more than 400 forced disappearances, and more than 800 cases of torture and ill-treatment, including beatings, electric shocks, sexual assault, forced nudity, and psychological violence, according to human rights organisations.

Others have been forced to flee. At least 130 Salvadoran human rights defenders and journalists are in exile, according to evidence submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by rights organisations last year.

Yet as the arrests and exiles have spiralled, the president’s popularity has grown.

Bukele has benefited from the perceived security boost brought about by the state of emergency, which he credited with a 98% fall in the homicide rate between the mid-2010s and 2024. In reality, this decline is part of a trend that started before he was elected; the 2015 homicide rate had already been halved by the time he took office in 2019.

Still, the president has become an icon for thousands of Latin Americans calling for the implementation of the ‘Bukele model’ to tackle violence in their own countries, and other presidents in the region, such as Javier Milei in Argentina and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, have also praised or imitated his “iron fist”.

Even US president Donald Trump has called Bukele “one of my favourite people” earlier this year, lavishing praise on his maximum-security prisons. Last year, Trump’s administration deported Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center without any administrative or judicial proceedings or conviction.

‘The least we can do is not silence our voices’

Opposing mining in El Salvador means risking your life, says Vidalina Morales, the leader of the Asociación de Desarrollo Económico y Social (ADES).

In 2004, when Canadian mining company Pacific Rim sought to extract gold in Cabañas, in northern El Salvador, local communities resisted. By the end of 2009, three ADES environmental activists involved in the campaign against the mine had been killed: Marcelo Rivera, Ramiro Rivera and Dora Sorto, who was eight months pregnant. Their deaths, which involving torture and ambushes, were blamed on gangs and local hitmen. No arrests were ever made.

While Pacific Rim has strongly denied all involvement in the violence in Cabañas, public pressure in the wake of the deaths led the then government to reject the company’s mining permit – and after a long battle, ADES, alongside community organisations, churches and universities, spearheaded a grassroots movement that achieved something unprecedented. In 2017, El Salvador became the first country to ban metal mining due to its impact on its small territory of 21,000 square kilometres and on the Lempa River, which runs the length of the country, from the north to south.

Morales has been the most prominent female voice in the country’s anti-mining struggle and was among the first to raise the alarm about Bukele’s interest in reviving the industry. Having secured a second term in 2024, Bukele asked his legislators to overturn the law banning mining and draft one that would allow it. In December 2024, the ruling party fast-tracked a new legislation, which came into effect 15 days later.

"As long as there is injustice, I believe the least we can do is not silence our voices,” Morales says.

In January 2023, she did not hesitate to speak out on behalf of five environmental activists – ADES’ director, Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, its legal adviser, Saúl Agustín Rivas, and three leaders of the Santa Marta community in Cabañas – who were arrested and accused of murdering a woman in 1989, when they were guerrilla members fighting the Salvadoran army. A body was never found, and the case was based on the statement of a witness who denied having witnessed the crime.

Believing the group had been criminalised for defending the environment, Morales took on the role of spokesperson for ADES as the organisation’s president, leading protests and press conferences to denounce their arrests.

Then, on May 17, 2023, police arrested one of her sons under the state of emergency.

“When they arrested my son, those were the most difficult hours I have ever lived. What they were after was for me to stop speaking, to step back from the fight,” Morales says.

Human rights organisations say the criminal persecution of the family members of defenders and journalists is another form of state pressure: vicarious violence.

Although Morales’ son was released the following day after public pressure, the harassment did not stop. She reported being watched and followed in the street, people lurking around her home at night, unidentified individuals asking about her in the local communities and at the organisation’s offices.

None of it silenced her. In October 2024, a court acquitted the five Santa Marta environmentalists, but an appeals court ordered the trial to be repeated. This case was closed again in September 2025, absolving the five defendants, but their community fears the prosecutor office could insist on their retrial.

‘If they arrest me, they’ll let me die’

For 20 years, Malcolm Cartagena worked at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, El Salvador’s highest electoral authority, which oversees all elections and settles disputes between political parties and allegations of electoral rights violations.

Most recently, Cartagena was an electoral trainer at the tribunal. He taught voting reception committees, police officers, prosecutors and staff from the Human Rights Ombudsman’s office how a democratic election day should run.

When Bukele pushed through reforms to merge municipalities, reduce the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly and change the method for allocating them, Cartagena was sure the 2024 elections would leave the country less democratic. And so it proved. That year’s presidential elections secured Bukele’s re-election – having amended the constitution to allow him to run again – and the parliamentary elections gave him a near-absolute majority in Congress, with 54 out of 60 MPs.

Cartagena became one of the key voices openly criticising these reforms, alongside Cristosal’s anti-corruption lawyer Ruth López, whom he had worked with years earlier at the start of his career, when they were both advisers to one of the tribunal’s justices, Eugenio Chicas. “She’s like my sister,” Cartagena says of López, who is a prominent human rights defender in El Salvador.

Both Cartagena and Lopez documented allegations of fraud put forward by the opposition, highlighted irregularities during the vote count, and offered their technical analysis.

In February 2025, their former boss, Chicas, was detained. López knew the same fate could come for her. She told Cartagena so; they discussed it many times. But she had decided to stay in El Salvador. For Cartagena, the answer was more complicated: he suffers from severe chronic kidney failure and needs daily dialysis at home. If detained, he knew what could happen. “There are sick people who have died in state custody,” he says. “If they arrest me, they’ll let me die.”

When López was arrested on charges of embezzlement in May 2025, Cartagena was the first person beyond her family to find out. That night, he was unable to sleep, certain that they would come for him next.

One month later, three armed police officers knocked on his door. They said they were conducting a census. They asked how many people lived in his house, whether he had internet access, whether he had a vehicle – yet they were writing on a loose sheet of paper and the vehicle they were driving had no license plates.

In El Salvador, censuses are not conducted by the police.

Out of all the houses in the alley, Cartagena says the officers visited only his. Later they returned and asked his neighbours how many people lived at his house. Cartagena had already seen this script play out at other homes of activists and dissidents: vague questions, an intimidating presence, and then, weeks later, an arrest. He got the message.

Cartagena left the country without having undergone dialysis for three days. When he arrived at his destination, doctors admitted him immediately: his lungs were filled with fluid. He spent three days in the hospital.

Today, López and Chicas remain in prison – Bukele’s political prisoners – while Cartagena calls himself an exile of the regime. There are no open criminal proceedings against him, and yet he cannot return. He is far from the only one; more than 80 people left El Salvador after López’s detention.

A war of attrition

López’s employer, Cristosal, and another human rights group, Tutela Legal María Julia Hernández (named to honour a late lawyer who fought for the rights of the victims of the civil war), were blacklisted from meetings with executive authorities after criticising Bukele’s order for military forces to occupy the Legislative Assembly at a press conference in early 2020.

“Since then, a narrative against NGOs began, and we never met with them again,” says human rights lawyer Abraham Ábrego, who heads strategic litigation at Cristosal. “We realised it was a different style of governance – one of an authoritarian character.”

Months later, in October 2020, Bukele used a national address to accuse Cristosal and Tutela Legal of being “front groups” for the FMLN, the political party that emerged out of the umbrella of leftist guerrillas known as Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, which fought the US-backed government in the Salvadoran Civil War between 1980 and 1992.

At the time of Bukele’s address, Cristosal and Tutela Legal were representing the victims and survivors of the El Mozote massacre. In December 1981, army members executed at least 988 people, most of them children, in a series of military operations against the FMLN guerrillas in the east of the country. Thirteen retired military officers are being prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Cristosal had been operating in El Salvador since 2014, documenting more than 1,000 cases of gang violence between 2017 and 2018 and providing support to those it displaced. The group had proposed legislation and mechanisms to protect victims of internal forced displacement, which the government refused to acknowledge.

In January 2022, the Ministry of Finance launched an exhaustive audit of Cristosal’s accounts going back to 2019. Although the organisation submitted all the requested documentation, in December 2022, the government withdrew a tax exemption it had held for years.

Cristosal filed legal complaints, and the courts declared themselves incompetent to rule on the matter. The process became trapped in an administrative labyrinth while the organisation was forced to invest time and resources in responding.

On 28 April 2025, while Cristosal was holding a press conference alongside Kerry Kennedy, the president of the US-based Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, police officers broke into the organisation's offices in San Salvador. By the time its anti-corruption lawyer, López, was arrested the following month, Cristosal had faced audits, documentation demands, accounting challenges, and public stigmatisation that branded them as “defenders of gang members”. Each action on its own looked like routine legal procedure, but together they were steadily narrowing Cristosal’s operational space.

Until López’s arrest, Cristosal had not considered leaving El Salvador. On 17 July 2025, Cristosal announced the closure of its San Salvador office and the transfer of its operations to Guatemala. Ábrego also moved to the country, where he continues his work for the company, which remains active in its defence of human rights. Last month Cristosal published a report documenting 245 victims of persecution, harassment, and criminalisation between 2019 and 2025. Of these, 86 remain detained without trial, and only seven have been convicted in proceedings without due process guarantees.

‘I left so that I could keep speaking out’

When Angélica Cárcamo, the former president of the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association and current director of the Central American Journalists’ Network, left El Salvador ten months ago, she expected to be out of the country for two weeks.

“I didn’t want to leave,” she says. The journalists’ association had documented how, between 2020 and 2022, the government overtook gang members and organised crime as the main perpetrator of attacks against journalists. The group tracked restrictions on press conferences, information blackouts and smear campaigns. Cárcamo had been one of the most prominent voices in these reports.

Almost 60 journalists from print, digital and community media have left El Salvador since the introduction of the May 2025 Foreign Agents Law targeting civil society and the media, according to data from the Central American Network.

Most left through regular channels, and some have applied for formal asylum processes abroad. As a result of their departures, some Salvadoran news outlets have ceased operations in the country and relocated to Costa Rica.

Some journalists have asked Cárcamo for help to get out after receiving threats or after being watched by police outside their homes. Others have written to her because they need urgent psychological support for the unresolved grief of having left their country, their children, their partners, their pets.

Then there are the journalists who are still inside El Salvador. Some are exposed in rural areas, where community reporters and land rights defenders often work without institutional protections, limited access to legal support, and closer proximity to local power structures such as police, military forces, or municipal authorities. Cárcamo, in contrast, is free and abroad, and that freedom also feels like a heavy burden. She never meant to flee, and she asks herself whether she did the right thing. She chooses to keep speaking out.

Silenced and persecuted abroad

In February 2025 the prosecutor office arrested Fidel Zavala, a member of the Human Rights and Community Defense Unit (UNIDEHC), a group of independent lawyers and community leaders. His arrest came seven months after Zavala filed a criminal complaint against the director of prisons, Osiris Luna, for alleged torture of inmates – becoming the first ex-prisoner to take legal action against Salvadoran prison authorities.

Zavala had previously spent 13 months in prison on unsubstantiated charges before a court dismissed the case against him in March 2023 and declared him innocent. He says he was subjected to arbitrary detention and torture, and that he witnessed multiple killings by prison guards, adding that he is willing to confront those responsible in court.

The same day Zavala was detained last year, the prosecutor office issued an arrest warrant against two other UNIDEHC members, lawyer Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya, who were in Spain at the time. Cruz’s home was also raided and UNIDEHC’s offices searched.

The charges against Zavala, Cruz and Joya stem from their legal work supporting the La Floresta community, which is resisting eviction from disputed land. Authorities accused the trio of illicit association and obstruction of justice for allegedly interfering with a police operation during a search in the area.

Cruz decided not to return to El Salvador. The decision, she says, “was not heroic, but the only one possible”.

She and Joya knew they’d be arrested at the airport if they returned home. But Cruz’s mother and her children remained in El Salvador, facing threats of prosecution for alleged obstruction during the search. Because of this, the whole family had to leave the country. But their departure did not stop the persecution.

When Cruz and Joya failed to appear before the courts, the judge requested a red notice through Interpol, which sends a request to law enforcement around the world to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.

Interpol issued the alert, despite the attorney general’s office having filed the indictment without the complete case file. Spanish police summoned and detained Joya for more than 30 hours while the National Court evaluated the warrant. Cruz presented herself voluntarily the following day and was detained.

Both lawyers were released on the condition of compliance with the Spanish judiciary’s precautionary measures, such as the surrender of their passports, a biweekly check-in at a court, and restrictions on movement, while it reviewed an international detention request linked to charges in El Salvador.

The UN warned against transnational repression: persecution that crosses borders and the use of international law enforcement tools to intimidate or force returns. Amnesty International is also following their case.

The Interpol alert was withdrawn in December 2025, and last month the Spanish government granted Cruz and Joya’s asylum applications, recognising the risks their work entails in El Salvador. “In my country, a human rights defender can be in danger because of her voice speaking out, and this ruling confirms that,” says Cruz.

The goal of forced exile, Cruz says, is silence. This is not an option for her. As she awaits the outcome of Salvadoran legal proceedings from more than 8,000 kilometres away in the Basque Country, she continues to speak out, denouncing and documenting the crimes committed by the country she had to leave.

“If those who report leave and stop speaking, the official narrative goes unchallenged. The task now is to leave no voids. To document from wherever we are.”

We reached out for interviews and questions about these cases to the General Attorney office, the Presidential Press Office, the Presidential Communications Office and the National Civil Police. None have answered so far.

*This is an edited version of a feature first published by FOCOS. This story is supported by the Impact Reporting program of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (iwpr.net), helping local journalists around the world make a difference.

Who won the 2025 African Cup of Nations depends on who you ask. On the pitch, Senegal. On paper, Morocco – the football tournament’s host. But beyond the disputed result, AFCON has revealed a story of how a host country managed its image – and who it pushed out of sight to do so.

Late last year, Morocco forcibly displaced hundreds of Black migrants as it prepared to welcome more than 600,000 tourists for AFCON. While such operations are not uncommon in the country, the Moroccan Human Rights Association (AMDH) told openDemocracy that there was a significant spike ahead of the tournament.

Displacements often “intensify” when the world’s eyes are on Morocco for international sports tournaments, diplomatic summits, or big cultural festivals, according to AMDH president Souad Brahma.

“Migrants are removed not only from public view but from areas linked to onward travel to Europe” as Morocco tries to present itself as a reliable EU security partner, Brahma told openDemocracy.

The EU and its member states have channelled more than €2bn to Morocco for so-called “migration management” over the past decade, including for border control and security measures. This funding, Brahma said, has positioned Morocco as the “gendarme of Europe”.

There are between 25,000 and 40,000 so-called irregular migrants in Morocco at any given time, the Interior Ministry estimates. The majority are from West Africa and have fled repression, conflict, extreme poverty, and climate crises – and many hope to travel on to Europe.

The Moroccan government reported intercepting 73,640 irregular migration attempts to Europe in 2025. The impact of this was most visible in Spain, which is only 13 kilometres from Morocco at its closest point; irregular arrivals fell by 42.6% last year to 36,775 people, according to the Spanish Interior Ministry.

Morocco primarily displaces migrants through internal pushback. The authorities use buses to move people away from key departure corridors to Europe, such as the country’s Mediterranean coastline and its south Atlantic coast, before dropping them in remote towns in central or southern Morocco.

There, they are left to fend for themselves, with no accommodation or support provided, according to a 2024 investigation by Lighthouse Reports, which aligns with the AMDH’s findings.

Dialo is a 40-year-old Congolese man who has been living in Morocco for 15 years. He previously held a legal residence permit, but this has since expired, and he has struggled to renew it due to reforms to the process that require migrants to submit legally binding lease agreements and work contracts, both of which are often hard for those working in the informal economy to obtain.

He recounts a terrifying ordeal in 2022. “I went to visit a sick friend in Takadoum, and two men forcibly took me to the local authority’s office. I had all my papers, but no one listened.”

After seven hours in custody, he and others were loaded onto a bus, their phones confiscated, and wristbands placed on them. Hours later, they were dumped near Khénifra with no money, no water, and nothing else.

Another 44-year-old Congolese man living in the capital city of Rabat, who spoke to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity, confirms the constant threat. Like Dialo, he has struggled to renew his expired residency card amid the heightened requirements. “I’ve been displaced three times, sometimes for hours by bus toward Agadir or Beni Mellal. If you pay the authorities €20-30, they might let you go. It has become a profitable business.”

The forced relocations are carried out without any due process and target Black migrants, the AMDH has found, including those with valid residency cards, such as international students or refugees under the protection of the UNHCR. Other demographics do not receive similar treatment.

“These operations are coordinated by multiple public forces,” Brahma said, “the National Security, the Royal Gendarmerie, the Auxiliary Forces; they perform raids on urban neighbourhoods and informal migrant camps.”

The consequences of these expulsions – and of the journeys that follow – can be fatal.

Amid harsh weather conditions on 11 March, local authorities discovered four bodies, believed to be migrants, near a town on Morocco’s eastern border with Algeria. Three months earlier, extreme cold killed nine people near the Moroccan-Algerian border in the Ras Asfour area, according to human rights sources cited in Hespress, a national news publication.

The European Union did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

'The anger was overwhelming’

AFCON brought visitors to Morocco from competing nations, as well as the US, the UK and France, which the government credited with boosting the economy by more than €1.5bn.

Ahead of the tournament, the AMDH’s Rabat branch recorded the removal of one to two hundred migrants every day. The forced relocations stopped around three weeks before the first game, which the association suggested was to avoid international scrutiny.

Migrants were “pushed far from major cities, from airport corridors, from tourist zones,” Brahma said. “The aim is to avoid projecting the image of a Morocco that violates migrants’ rights.”

Far from ending after the tournament finished on 18 January, the relocations and deportations intensified in the weeks after the match, says Rabii Sadere, a member of AMDH’s Asylum and Migration Committee.

The final in January saw clashes erupt on the pitch and between Senegal and Morocco’s fans. While Senegal secured a 1-0 victory on the day, the Confederation of African Football controversially overturned its win last month, retrospectively declaring Morocco the winner due to a 17-minute walk-off by Senegalese players in protest at a disallowed goal and a VAR decision. Senegal has appealed the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international body headquartered in Switzerland.

After the game, the dispute continued online, with racist posts, comments and videos circulating on Moroccan social media. These were often amplified through a hashtag calling for the “deportation of Africans”. While Morocco is also an African country, it has historically culturally identified as Arab and is indigenously Amazigh.

“We all wanted to win, Moroccan and Senegalese, but after the match, the anger was overwhelming,” a 29-year-old Senegalese resident of Casablanca, who is living in Morocco legally, told openDemocracy.

The tensions surrounding the football tournament echoed those shaping the country’s migration policy. Last month, around a hundred migrants were rounded up daily and expelled from northern Moroccan provinces, according to a report in Hespress and Sadere’s analysis of local news reports. Local media reported that the Moroccan authorities said the expulsions came in response to complaints from residents about violence and theft by migrant people.

In the Casablanca neighbourhoods of Derb Sultan and Derb El Kebir, security forces reportedly arrested 43 migrant people following clashes involving stone-throwing, causing injuries and material damage.

“The tensions of one match cannot erase decades of shared history. Morocco and Senegal are bound by deep, enduring ties,” said Bounna Saar, a Senegalese resident of Casablanca.

Still, though, the experiences in AFCON have raised concerns about how migrants in the country will be treated in the run-up to the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco is co-hosting with Spain and Portugal. “I fear a tightening of security policies, for example, the introduction of a specialised electronic visa, and an increase in security restrictions regarding the movement of migrants in an irregular situation,” said Sadere.

Neither the Moroccan authorities nor the Confederation of African Football, which runs the African Cup of Nations, responded to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

___________

Our reporter in Morroco has chosen to be anonymous for safety reasons. They said, "Reporting on this topic for international media can put me at risk, especially given the current climate for journalists in Morocco."

Renée Boskaljon is a Dutch independent journalist who specialises in EU migration policy and Moroccan society. She has written for The Guardian, The New Humanitarian, Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Dutch media outlets. She is based between Spain, Morocco and The Netherlands.

As the dust settles on last week’s Hungarian election, which saw Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party wiped out in a landslide win by centre-right candidate Péter Magyar, some onlookers are left puzzled.

What changed? Hungarians, including many Fidesz voters, have long known of the Orbán regime’s corruption and anti-democratic measures, which were backed by both Donald Trump in the US and Vladimir Putin in Russia. Was Magyar just in the right place at the right time, or is there something deeper at play? And what can progressive forces around the world learn from him?

We know that it was not primarily – or not only – propaganda that kept millions wedded to Fidesz for so long. This is clear from a recent interview given to an independent media outlet (Partizán) in which a Fidesz politician explains that she had been scandalised by the enrichment of Orbán’s close circle and the cases of abuse within child protection services that had come to light – she just did not believe these were intrinsic to the workings of Fidesz. So if Fidesz politicians and voters alike were often aware of these issues, what kept them supporting the party for so long?

For many, there was no good alternative. Although former opposition parties have long called out Orbán’s oligarchic regime, they fundamentally accepted his terms of the game by letting Fidesz take control of the national identity discourse while they claimed the opposite, the international(ist) position, as their own.

In doing so, opposition politicians largely spoke the language of a relatively small group of urban progressives, emphasising liberalism, Europeanism, and free markets. This not only distanced them from more nation-minded rural voters, but also put them in a near-constant defensive state because they had to continuously rebut Fidesz’s charges that they were serving ‘foreign interests’. In the end, they were unable to come up with a competing counter narrative.

Magyar, in contrast, reclaimed national symbols that Fidesz had monopolised, allowing him to speak the language of many more Hungarians, uniting the progressive anti-Orbán camp with huge numbers of rural voters. Most importantly, he broke with a decades-long dividing line in Hungarian politics, that between the liberal and national-conservative camps.

These blocs were formed after the regime change in 1989 and alternately held power until 2010. But by the late 2000s, unemployment, economic instability, and the mismanagement of economic crises by the left-liberal coalition government led to this bloc’s massive loss of legitimacy.

This gave Orbán a significant boost in 2010 as he sought to provide an alternative path focusing, at least rhetorically, on Hungarians taking control of their own country, politically as well as economically. While this turned out to mean mostly the Fidesz-friendly oligarchy, the message resonated with millions of people who had been slapped in the face by the realities of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy.

The left-liberal block could not rebuild itself during the 2010s and the early 2020s because it did not understand why Orbán had come to power in the first place. It did not present much of an alternative to pre-2010 liberal politics, which most people did not want anything to do with.

Magyar, on the other hand, came up with a new narrative. He has told voters that Orbán does not have a monopoly over the national discourse and that while his promises and goals had essentially been good, corruption and greed had made him betray his own people.

His rise to victory is also partly luck, though. First, Magyar’s history as a Fidesz loyalist meant he understood the party’s tactics for dealing with opponents. He was able to avoid falling into the traps Fidesz tried to lure him into throughout the election campaign.

Second, he came onto the political scene in February 2024 after the relatively prosperous 2010s had given way to economic stagnation. When a scandal broke out over the Fidesz-linked president having given clemency to a man who had helped cover up paedophilia in a state-run children’s home, Magyar seized the moment.

He galvanised mass anger and dissatisfaction into a broad, heterogeneous political movement. He was able to address a formerly very passive group of voters, among them young people as well as middle-aged women and small business owners who had become key to political organising across the country.

It remains unclear what Magyar’s offer consists of, though. He has campaigned on democratic restoration, investment in healthcare, education and infrastructure, as well as ending propaganda and corruption – but he has also pledged to keep various elements of Fidesz’s politics.

This may have been a political necessity as he faced off Europe’s most well-funded propaganda machine, but it is unrealistic, and has set him up to fail. Magyar cannot channel the same resources towards well-off families through state-supported loans that Fidesz has, while also delivering on his vows to increase support for the poorest.

This is particularly true given the country’s budget is in ruins. His Tisza party will eventually have to make choices, and reliance on expert knowledge, which Magyar has repeatedly emphasised, cannot replace a unifying political ideology.

Whatever comes next, though, this is a historic moment for Hungarian democracy: voter turnout has never been higher, and no party has ever received as many votes as Tisza in the country’s democratic history.

A 16-year-old autocratic and oligarchic regime will now be forced to step down. Tens of thousands of formerly passive citizens had joined politics in the last two years, which is a massive resource for Hungary’s future democracy. Young people in the country now have a reference point for what mass collective action, organising, and political change might look like, an experience which might prove decisive for their generation’s future.

It’s important that they – we – don’t see this moment as the ‘new end of history’, though. The narrative of a ‘return’ to liberal democracy is dubious as we cannot erase the rise of right-wing and far-right forces, nor the reasons behind their success.

In the end, Orbán’s defeat was in part caused by him losing touch with Hungarian society as domestic concerns were overshadowed by his international ambitions. Magyar stepped up to be the new ‘voice of the people’, and his victory is instructive for left-wing, liberal and centrist forces alike, not just in Hungary but beyond: above all, voters want politicians to listen to their lived experiences and narration of their own lives, in their own words, not get stuck in echo chambers.

Dalma Vatai is a sociologist and journalist based in Budapest. She covers domestic politics, social issues, and feminist topics. 

It’s 2017 in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest, and the World Congress of Families has landed in town.

Organised by US anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ personality Brian Brown, the annual gathering of Christian nationalist campaigners, political figures, think tanks and academics pulled off its biggest coup yet: welcoming Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to the stage as a keynote speaker.

Orbán used his speech to describe Europe’s future as “under attack”, with the region “losing out in the population competition between great civilisations”. He claimed that the EU wanted to solve the problems posed by an ageing population and low birth rates with immigration.

Hungary, he told the audience, believes differently.

“We must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves,” Orbán said, through the “restoration of natural reproduction” to achieve “replacement” birth rates for a white, Christian Hungary.

This was the moment the great replacement conspiracy theory went mainstream. An EU leader promoting a far-right belief that falsely claims white people face a demographic winter due to immigration, a replacement aided by feminists and liberal elites who repress the white birth rate through abortion and contraception.

The speech kicked off Orbán’s great replacement policy platform, one that effectively banned asylum-seeking people from entering the country, punished the LGBTQ+ community, and incentivised married Hungarian women to have more babies.

The same year, as if to emphasise Orbán’s point, Hungary’s minister for human capacities, Miklos Kasler, wrote: “To this day six million abortions have been performed, thereby causing one of the worst demographic disasters of the Hungarian nation. If it had not been so, there would be over 20 million ethnic Hungarians in total.”

On Sunday, Hungarians said they had had enough. After 16 years of authoritarian rule, Orbán and his Fidesz party were out. His former colleague turned political rival Péter Magyar and his centre-right Tisza party won a massive majority.

Orbán’s defeat is not only a relief to the European Union and to Ukraine – Magyar has promised to unblock a €90bn EU aid package to the country, which Orbán had objected to – but it served a body blow to the conspiracist anti-gender movement that saw Hungary as its home in Europe.

How Orbán took the great replacement mainstream

Orbán used his 2017 World Congress of Families speech to announce his family protection programme, where married ethnic Hungarian women would receive rewards for having multiple children. The idea had disturbing echoes of Hitler handing out medals to large families in 1930s Germany.

Unlike child benefit or tax credits in the UK, the policy rewarded a narrow, racialised and gendered group, excluding Roma women, single mothers and rainbow families.

“In my interpretation,” Katalin Kevehazi, the president of the Budapest-­based JÓL-­LÉT (Well-­ Being) Foundation, told Balkan Insight in 2019, “this Family Protection Programme [...] is part of a ‘nation-building’ agenda.”

The approach is summed up in Feminism For The 99%: A Manifesto. Authors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser write that by “incentivising births of the ‘right’ kind, while discouraging those of the ‘wrong’ kind, [governments] have designed education and family policies to produce not just ‘people’ but (for example) ‘Germans’, ‘Italians’ or ‘Americans’.” Or, in this case, Hungarians. By 2022, Hungary had passed new restrictions on abortion, demanding women listen to a foetal heartbeat before a termination.

It was this family protection programme that cemented Orbán’s position as the darling of the global anti-gender movement.

Conservative-turned-Reform commentator, Tim Montgomerie, described the scheme as “worthy of close study”, while members of Trump’s administration praised Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” approach. Media personality Tucker Carlson described Hungary as having a government that “actually cares about making sure their own people thrive, instead of promising the nation’s wealth to illegal immigrants”.

Alongside rewarding heterosexual, Christian marriage, the government attacked the LGBTQ+ community, which they positioned as a threat to children and to Hungarian culture. In his ambition to create a “Christian Hungary in a Christian Europe”, Orbán acted to strip away LGBTQ+ equality.

Parliament passed laws to prevent same-sex couples from adopting, and mimicked Orbán’s “lion” Putin in banning so-called “gay propaganda”. In May 2020, the government effectively outlawed legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people, followed in 2025 by Hungary amending its constitution to define "the mother is a woman, the father is a man". That same year, Hungary banned Pride marches.

All this activity turned Hungary into the heart of European and transatlantic anti-gender organising, with think tanks such as the Danube Institute and the Centre for Fundamental Rights setting up shop in Budapest and backing anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ efforts globally.

But Orbán did not always get his way. A 2022 referendum to further restrict “gay propaganda” was defeated by a “hope-based campaign” that celebrated LGBTQ+ people, their friends, and families. And in 2024, Fidesz suffered a major blow to its popularity when President Katalin Novak had to resign having pardoned a man jailed for forcing children to retract sexual abuse claims against a director of a state-run children's home. The scandal exposed a hypocrisy at the heart of a party that claimed its anti-LGBTQ+ laws were motivated by child protection.

And on 12 April 2026, Orbán did not get his way yet again. He suffered a decisive defeat, with Magyar winning a two-thirds majority in Parliament at an election that had a record-high turnout of 79.5%.

Magyar is no liberal. LGBTQ+ rights groups have criticised his silence on gender rights, which still face an uncertain future, and it is unclear if he will reform Hungary’s abortion law (abortion is legal but with barriers to access). But one thing is for sure: losing Orbán serves as a body blow to a movement determined to strip away women’s, migrant, and LGBTQ+ people’s rights.

That, surely, is something to celebrate.

Within hours of Donald Trump accepting a two-week ceasefire in Iran, walking back on his dire threat that “a whole civilisation will die”, Binyamin Netanyahu did his best to wreck any prospect of peace.

Israel launched an intense bombardment of Beirut and other Lebanese towns and cities, with 100 attacks in the first ten minutes. More than 300 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) also carried out a series of strikes across Gaza, including a precisely targeted armed drone attack on the car of Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah, the 262nd journalist to be killed by Israel since October 2023.

These massacres serve as a reminder that it was Netanyahu, not Trump, who started the war on Iran and that he continues to pull the strings. For as long as that’s true, the prospects of a lasting peace deal are very low.

Provided the Strait of Hormuz remains open, Trump can now claim victory – even if that claim is far from the truth – but Netanyahu could not.

Trump wanted to kill Ayatollah Khamenei and cripple the Iranian military, including its nuclear ambitions, so Iran could not threaten its neighbours, especially Israel. Of course, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has not been crippled, but the US president’s self-belief and capacity to lie mean he would likely get away with saying otherwise.

The Israeli PM, however, needed regime change and the irreversible end of theocratic rule. A win over Iran had to be complete, not least to ensure his success at Israel’s general election later in the year.

But the Iranian regime is still intact; the popular Iranian uprising against the theocracy that the US and Israel expected failed to materialise. As such, a peace deal at this point would be a disaster for Netanyahu. If his devastating IDF Lebanon assault fails, he no doubt has more tricks of persuasion up his sleeve.

The extent of Netanyahu’s control of the war agenda, both its origins and its conduct, has been both disguised by Trump’s bombastic attention-seeking and overshadowed by the actions of the IRGC, which has survived intense bombing and developed a clear strategy: attack the eyes and ears of US and Israeli systems.

As Kelly Grieco, a specialist at the Stimson Centre, a Washington-based foreign affairs think tank, puts it, the IRGC is systematically targeting three “distinct functional categories”: radar and communications infrastructure, aerial tankers and airborne early warning.

“Each is a critical enabler of US air operations,” Grieco told Defense News. “That’s not random. That’s a target set derived from an understanding of how US airpower functions and where it is most exposed. The pattern suggests deliberate doctrine, or something close enough to it, not opportunism.”

The IRGC indeed reports that its US targets have included the Bahrain HQ of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet – the US’s primary hub for coordinating its naval operations in the region – a $1.1bn early warning radar in Qatar, and two radar facilities at sites in the UAE. It also successfully attacked the US’s Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, destroying an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control plane. Two weeks earlier, it hit and damaged five KC-135 Stratotanker refuelling aircraft at the same base.

It is essential to remember that the IRGC was founded in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and expanded in size and power during the Iran-Iraq War between 1980 and 1988, when as many as half a million young Iranians died resisting Saddam Hussein’s opportunistic invasion of Iran.

Back then, the IRGC managed to prevent Hussein from annexing Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province and gaining total control over the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway. It has evolved into an ideological entity rooted in the defence of the revolution and is much stronger than Iran’s conventional armed forces.

The IRGC’s strength continues to lie in asymmetric defensive warfare. It has training, arsenals and weapons suited to survival and the wearing down of its much stronger opponents. The success of this approach against the US and Israel is clear, despite the thousands of Iranians killed or maimed and the billions of dollars of damage inflicted across the country.

Taking control of the Strait of Hormuz has been an obvious move, and even the repeated attacks on neighbouring states have a purpose. They may have shocked and angered leaders in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, but they sent a clear message: we are facing an existential threat from the US and Israel, and you are either with us or against us.

Iran could now continue the conflict with the US and Israel for weeks, if not months, if it so chooses. Despite the claims of the US president, the IRGC is not running out of missiles and armed drones – far from it.

CNN reports that around half of its missile launchers are still intact, as are thousands of one-way attack drones, while armed drones are being produced in backstreet workshops. Even Israel assesses that Iran still has more than 1,000 missiles capable of reaching it, while Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon includes as many as 10,000 shorter-range rockets, according to military briefings cited by Israeli media last weekend.

Given all of this, can the peace talks succeed? Probably not, meaning the US may embark on a huge bombing campaign against the Iranian infrastructure and its very society, to the relief of Netanyahu.

There are still two avenues for hope, though. One is that Trump or the US public comes to realise that Netanyahu has been pulling the strings all along, which would undoubtedly dent the US president’s ego. The other is through the objection of external agents of influence; superpowers such as China or India could make clear that destroying Iranian society is not acceptable.

Extraordinarily, given its small size, the UK is also an external agent with specific influence. A sustained US bombing campaign of Iran requires the mass use of strategic air power – for the US Air Force, that must include the fleet of B-1B Lancer long-range bombers. Only 21 of those are reported to be “mission ready”, 15 of which are at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, each carrying more than 30 tons of a wide range of ordnance.

The loss of Fairford wouldn’t stop the war, but it would seriously hinder Trump’s plans. No other comparable European bases are available; only Fairford has the necessary and complex equipment to house the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the easy access to a huge munitions depot, which is located at the nearby RAF Welford. In any case, the UK is likely the only European state that would want a US air base like this right now.

A private word from Keir Starmer that the UK may follow Spain and others in closing its airspace to American war planes would have a direct impact. It would certainly help explain Starmer’s unexpected visit this week to the Middle East.

The UK is seeking to grant ministers wide-ranging new powers to rewrite significant portions of the Online Safety Act through amendments tucked into two unrelated bills, a move that experts warn could bypass normal parliamentary scrutiny.

The proposed changes would allow ministers to amend the act by adding as much as a third to the regulatory regime using so-called Henry VIII clauses, limiting Parliament to a simple yes-or-no vote on an unforeseeable number of new rules, rather than full debate or amendment.

The change would allow the central government to limit detailed parliamentary scrutiny and amend the act more quickly. “It’s basically [introducing] a third of the Online Safety Act,” and gives ministers power to add as many unforeseen new rules as they want, said Essex University law professor Lorna Woods, legal adviser to the Online Safety Act Network.

In March, the government proposed edits to the Crime and Policing Bill and the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would enable these changes.

The move comes after admissions by the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom that it didn’t have the power to address Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok’s deepfake scandal (when the tool was used to create non-consensual sexualised images primarily of women and children), due to limitations in how the Online Safety Act laws apply to chatbots. The UK government announced it would “move fast to shut a legal loophole and force all AI chatbot providers to abide by illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act.”

The amendments also come ahead of decisive UK local council elections and at a moment when the Labour government is “under a huge amount of pressure” to deliver, said Owen Bennett, former head of international online safety at Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. “In general, there’s a sense of, ‘we need to go farther and faster.’”

The proposed changes have been criticised for their potential consequences, including granting unfettered power to current and future governments to change what was already a highly contested and long-fought-for act.

There are also worries that limiting parliamentary debate will weaken the democratic legitimacy of the regime, potentially making it easier for tech companies to challenge rules or lobby ministers directly rather than engage with Parliament.

This proposed amendment also comes amidst the perception that the UK government is eager to attract Big Tech investment while simultaneously exerting greater executive control over tech regulation.

The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed into law in 2023, is the result of years of negotiations and revisions, and has long been criticised as complex and internally inconsistent.

The Act is “a bit like Frankenstein,” said Javier Ruiz Diaz, technology and human rights lead at Amnesty International UK and former policy director at digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group. “It became this really complicated system” that “no one really is happy with,” he said, describing it as “a bit of a mess” with various bills and addendums “bolted on” over time.

Still, experts say that complexity reflects years of negotiation, something they argue is undermined by the new shortcut approach.

“The concept underpinning the Online Safety Act … [is that it] gives you the house and then the furniture can be put in later,” said Catherine Allen, founder of immersive technology research and consultancy Limina Immersive. As new technology emerges, these can be addressed through amendments to the act, she said.

At around 300 pages, the act has been characterised as the most wide-ranging effort by a Western government to regulate online safety, amidst a wide variety of efforts by governments to regulate, according to a survey of online safety regulations globally conducted by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

Changes from a ‘desperate’ government

Now the government has proposed amendments that could change a significant proportion of the Online Safety Act, in ways that are currently unpredictable, say experts.

The mechanism is indirect: rather than amending the OSA directly, the government has inserted provisions into unrelated legislation.

The change – the inclusion of Henry VIII clauses in both bills – would allow ministers to change legislation without allowing Parliament to amend the proposals. In these cases, now, Parliament would only be able to say yes or no to any new rules, without any discussion of the merits or downsides. So while technically some “parliamentary supervision remains, … it is extremely limited,” said Elena Abrusci, senior lecturer in law at Brunel University, in an email to Tech Policy Press.

“To be fair… this is not dramatically a new approach,” she said, referring to how the act already provided for the possibility for ministers and the secretary of state to expand on the offences under its scope through secondary legislation. “What is new is the specific focus on AI-generated content.”

“Changing one act with another act is actually kind of normal,” said Woods. The problem is using these wide-ranging powers to do it, she said.

The Crime and Policing Bill, introduced early last year by the Labour government, is a broad bill introduced to enforce the government’s Safer Streets initiative, which broadly aims to increase confidence in policing and reduce violent crime. While the bill expands policing powers by covering a wide swathe of topics, from violence against women and children and knife crime (and attracting criticism for its regulations, including banning face coverings at protests), it also has implications for the tech sector by dealing with online safety, fraud and data, such as removing criminal images online. The amendment to the bill would give senior government ministers the “power to amend [any provision of the Online Safety Act] in relation to illegal AI-generated content.”

The Children’s Wellbeing and School Bill, introduced by the Department of Education in 2024, aims to improve educational standards and online safety for children. The suggested amendment would give ministers the ability to change or add to any piece of legislation regarding restricting children’s access to the internet.

Since the UK’s Online Safety Act was launched almost three years ago, there have been 28 investigations into 92 services, according to regulator Ofcom in 2025. One measure, which required platforms to implement age verification measures to view pornographic content, was implemented last summer and received widespread backlash, including criticism from US politicians such as vice president JD Vance about how it would restrict US tech companies.

Experts acknowledged the need for speed, with caution. Online threats “are emerging at extraordinary speed,” said Elena Martellozzo, lecturer in criminology at Middlesex University, whose research has focused on online sexual abuse. While “those powers should never really be handed out lightly … these amendments aren’t necessarily a blank cheque, they are tied to specific harms,” she said.

The risks of speed

While there is support for the policy ideas behind the changes, the notion of giving wide-ranging power to ministers to amend the act is worrying, say critics.

The proposed changes feel like a “desperate” response to get ahead, said Ruiz Diaz. “As much as everyone wants to see children protected,” rushing to make changes is “generally not a good idea,” he said. “The moment you start shortcutting the process, you leave holes for companies to exploit that.”

That concern goes to the heart of criticisms of the change: that trading the democratic process for speed could ultimately weaken the enforceability of the regime.

The government could have felt pressured to quickly make these changes due to current debates about the Online Safety Act, including a push from the House of Lords for a social media ban, said Woods. The other option would have been to announce a strategy in the King’s Speech, a document that announces the government’s legislative and policy agenda, but this could have already been full, said Woods.

One of the problems with these changes, said Woods, is also that the scope of the two bills is limited and could yield rules that are “warped” and limited themselves. For example, to get a new rule about chatbots to fit into the scope of the Crime and Policing Bill, it would need to relate to illegal activity–but the problems with chatbots are wider and involve mental health and addiction. “So you end up with a partial solution,” she said.

Other concerns raised have included making it easier for the tech companies to challenge the government’s decisions and cite the lack of standard parliamentary consideration, as well as making it easier for Big Tech to lobby a few ministers rather than many more MPs.

The concerns around these new powers are also partly about public perception. “My big concern is what this actually says about online safety regulation in the UK and the message it sends internationally,” said Bennett.

Although the act has been controversial, its success and survival depend on the fact that the government can say it was brought into being by public opinion, he said. “You lose that when you start going down the route of giving power to the minister of the day to amend the Act. That sets a worrying precedent for trust.”

The problem with these changes, said Woods, is that the scope is limited.

More broadly, these changes also fit in with a pattern of the government using its “powers to direct regulators,” said Ruiz Diaz. They come amidst concerns in the UK and globally that too much executive control is being exerted on tech regulation.

In the UK, the government has been perceived as pressuring its competition watchdog to make pro-business decisions, and recently appointed an ex-Big Tech executive to lead it, sparking much criticism about conflicts of interest, both real and perceived.

While these amendments to regulate Big Tech initially don't seem to square with the government’s light-touch regulation with the Competition and Markets Authority, this dissonance makes sense, said Bennett.

While Big Tech companies see online safety as a cost of doing business, “when it comes to competition and antitrust, there’s money at stake,” he said. Companies “take that way more seriously. They aren’t willing to concede any ground.”

Abrusci’s hope is that institutions, including Ofcom and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, step in to “oversee the protection of fundamental rights and ensure that [the] government does not overstep their powers.” But she worries that these new “very broad powers…may impede proper accountability.”

This piece was originally published at Tech Policy Press. Jade-Ruyu Yan is a UK reporting fellow at openDemocracy and Tech Policy Press.

At a time when activists and campaigners are being asked to prove impact in ever more measurable ways, we wanted to ask a different question: what actually counts as a ‘win’? And what does it take to keep going when everything feels stacked against you?

As part of a new series on rights movements and what makes change possible, we spoke to Harsh Mander, a long-time human rights activist in India whose work spans areas from the right to food and shelter to his Caravan of Love campaign against hate violence and lynching.

Mander famously resigned from his position as a senior civil servant in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots, choosing instead to dedicate his life to justice work on behalf of marginalised communities. Since then, he has led landmark Supreme Court interventions on the right to food, homelessness and social protection. For many, he remains a deeply respected moral voice.

But he has also drawn sustained hostility from the Indian state, including criminal investigations, searches and legal action targeting him and organisations he has been associated with – moves widely seen by rights groups as part of a broader crackdown on dissent. A reminder that even speaking, organising, or documenting injustice carries real personal risk – and that not giving up can be a form of victory in itself.

His answers resist easy narratives of victory. Instead, they point toward something slower, harder, and perhaps more honest: that sometimes the work is the win.

Before you read, a couple of questions for you: Have you come across any clear victories for social movements? What does a ‘win’ look like in your context – and who gets to define it? Write to us at nandini.archer@openDemocracy.net. We’d like this to be a conversation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Looking back at your work, what would you describe as the actual win? What changed in a real material sense? And why does that change matter?

I'm a little wary about the idea of big wins, because in the nature of the work that I have chosen, the most important battles are those where victory is very hard. When you're working with the most oppressed and the most marginalised of people, holding together and fighting back is the battle, is the victory.

Standing in solidarity with people who are suffering great deprivation and injustice. We filed a case, collectively through the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, seeing that there should be a legal fundamental right to food, and hunger should be unacceptable and unlawful. And in that, the Supreme Court then appointed me as one of their commissioners. I was given the responsibility to help draft the National Food Security Act.

I also went to the courts for a number of other issues – for instance, challenging the idea that begging is a crime. It's a colonial hangover. And that, to treat begging as a crime and not as a situation of deprivation in which the state needs to intervene positively.

Homeless people were dying in large numbers on the streets and the government virtually had no programme, no shelters. I went to the Supreme Court. We got an order which said that the right to shelter is an extension of the fundamental right to life, and more than 2,000 homeless shelters came up across the country.

But I have realised over time, one big learning is that a just and equal state can only exist in a just and humane society.

The answers to great injustices are not simply amending a law or getting a court order. So, understand that there's a cultural comfort with inequality in India's long history of caste for 2,000 years. Unless we fight the acceptance of the legitimacy, the inevitability of inequality, simply a law is not going to change the material conditions of people who are at the bottom of this unequal social order.

The homeless shelters – it was heartbreaking to me. The government erected the shelters; they literally resembled what I would call Victorian poor houses, where it's just housing bodies at night and ejecting them in the morning to not have the scandal of hundreds of deaths. The ideas of dignity, respect – that the shelter is not the destination of a homeless person but part of a long journey – were not there.

And even when I went back to the courts, they could not understand – we've given you shelters now, what's the big deal?

In the Caravan of Love, I try to reach out to families of people who have been killed in acts of lynching in India over the last 10, 12 years. The crowds gather and beat an unarmed Muslim man to death and videotape it and circulate it. This is performative hate violence.

So I resolved with a group that we would reach the homes of each of these people who are lynched. We seek forgiveness. We say, you're not alone in your suffering. We pledge to be with you as you fight for justice and pick up the broken pieces of life, and you will tell your story.

Now that is a journey again – I started in 2017, and it continues because hate continues. This work continues. Persecution has only increased, including of me. So it's harder and harder to do this.

But what I see is that there is a societal deepening of radicalisation in India, and actually in most parts of the world. Strangely, more and more people around the world are choosing leaders who are teaching us to hate.

If I feel the problem is Narendra Modi or Donald Trump or Binyamin Netanyahu, I think I'm missing the point – because these are people who are chosen by people.

So there is a larger civilisational crisis, I believe. And it's not enough to engage with policy – you have to engage with society: power, inequalities, prejudices, beliefs, and its potential for rebuilding a humane society. I think that's my big learning.

When did it almost fall apart? How do you keep going – and not lose hope?

Yeah, that's a question I keep asking myself.

I'll tell you a little story. There is a young man – this group of young people who were agitating against the changes in India's citizenship law, which was targeting India's Muslims. It became a nationwide battle and he was put into prison, charged with a conspiracy.

When he came out, he was completely unbending. I had a long talk with him. I asked him, after everything you've faced, do you still have hope?

And he said, “na-umeed hona kufr hai” – despair is blasphemy.

It's a very interesting idea. I feel, however hard times become, hope is a public duty. Because if you feel nothing can get better, then you don't do anything. But if you believe that however hard things are, they can get better, then you are responsible to do all that is necessary to make things better.

In our own context in India, in this really difficult time where I see my life's work as battling hate on the one hand, battling indifference and acceptance of very unequal lives on the other – one of my books is called Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India – if I just looked around at my own social class in India, it would be very hard to hold onto hope.

There is something peculiar to our context. In the US, if you are white, there's a greater chance you'd vote Trump. If you're white with a university degree, the chances come down significantly. In India, it's the opposite. If you're upper-class Hindu, the chance that you're voting Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is higher; with a university degree, even higher; with elite institutions, even higher.

The kind of prejudice you hear in everyday conversations – among people who have held high positions, had the best life chances – is quite frightening.

I find that working-class Indians, to a much greater degree, still live a life of mutual respect, where you live with diversity as a way of life.

If I have to think of the quintessential Indian, who would she be? She would be this woman who comes out of her home, walks down the road, sees a mosque and bows her head. She goes a little further, sees a church, bows her head. Goes further, sees a temple, bows her head. I've not seen that woman anywhere else in the world, but I see her here.

And that gives me hope.

And the acts of kindness, of solidarity – that shows that our moral centre is not completely broken.

I studied Nazi Germany to try to understand what is happening in our own country. Historians told me that the percentage of non-Jewish Germans who saved Jewish lives was perhaps 0.01%. I would say that we are still very far from there. Whenever there are large riots, there are people who come out and try to save lives, put their own lives at risk. So there's a humanity that we retain.

The belief in the goodness of human nature, the potential of goodness in human nature, I think is what keeps me going.

What have you had to navigate or give up along the way?

I never regretted leaving the civil service.

The civil service is an extraordinary place in India. You have enormous power. It's very important to use that power not as something that you deserve, but something that is given to you in trust, so that you can use that power to change the lives of those who suffer the greatest oppression and deprivation.

I valued whatever I could do. And yet when this massacre happened in Gujarat, I realised that India was hurtling in a direction exactly the direction where it is now.

Where you can fight many battles as part of the state, but this battle is so fundamental that I can only fight it as an independent individual.

A lot of people wonder why I don't enter mainstream politics. I wonder if it is my own limitation – that I find it very difficult to negotiate grey moral areas. The political system involves all sorts of difficult moral choices which you might make for the larger good. I'm unable to allow myself to do that.

I often wonder whether that is a limitation, and I could have done more. But it is necessary for me to say: this is right, this is wrong.

So the third choice is working in civil society.

I could have worked with homeless kids and set up a beautiful institution for a few hundred children. It would have made me very happy and those children very happy. But what about the million others?

So I have chosen to work more in terms of attempting a model in societal engagement, with values.

Where have you refused to compromise?

All the time.

In the times that we are passing through now, the government is charging me with a whole range of grievous crimes – money laundering, conspiracy. I could spend the rest of my life in prison.

The strong advice that friends who care for me give is: turn silent now. Enough is enough. Go abroad. Universities would take you. And I've refused that.

I told the lawyers who offered to defend me: my brief is not to keep me out of prison. My brief is to defend my right to defend the Constitution. If I turn silent, they have won.

So many of my friends are very frustrated, because I've said nothing the government will do should silence my conscience, my work, and my voice.

What wouldn’t translate across contexts? What feels specific to India – and what feels global?

See, I think that more and more people are choosing the far right in country after country. That reflects a much bigger crisis. We are in the middle of a civilisational crisis – a moral crisis – of right and wrong.

Neoliberalism as an economic model has huge problems. But I think even bigger than neoliberalism as an economic model is neoliberalism as a moral framework.

Because neoliberalism teaches us that greed is good, that all you need to do is think about yourself, compete, aspire, climb over as many shoulders as you can, and acquire the best lifestyle.

But I remember growing up at a time when your mother would say: don't waste food, there are hungry children outside. You never flashed brand names. There was a conviction that a more just and equal world is possible. All three convictions have been stolen from young people today.

When young people ask me: can you summarise what we should do with our lives in two words?

I say: be kind.

When you see a homeless person, think of them as your own child. When you hear of somebody lynched, think of that person as your brother.

Once you do that, other things will follow. Justice will follow. Change will follow.

If we just try to make laws, but don't change the way we feel, then change will not happen.

Rose* was in her forties when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s. A period that was already anxiety-ridden and scary was made even worse when, she alleges, her consultant flirted with and sexually abused her.

“On the one hand, he was saving lives,” Rose told me when we first spoke in 2022. “On the other hand, he was ruining lives.”

Rose and I met when my then-colleague Sascha Lavin and I were investigating sexual abuse in healthcare. We found that patients had sexually harassed and assaulted thousands of healthcare staff, that more than 4,100 complaints of sexual abuse made to the police took place in NHS settings, and that the NHS had spent millions on compensation for victims and survivors of sexual harassment, assault and even rape.

When Rose reported her consultant to her GP and the local NHS trust, she faced a wall of disbelief, with lawyers acting on behalf of the trust and the consultant disputing her testimony in a disciplinary hearing and picking holes in her statements.

While the consultant admitted some of her allegations against him, such as his initiating conversations about inappropriate topics, he denied the sexual acts and the hearing found in his favour. Rose received £15,000 in compensation from the NHS trust due to a breach of duty, but the consultant is still practising today.

With the consultant’s alleged abuse of power not classed as a crime under English law, Rose had one more avenue for justice: the General Medical Council, the body that examines the fitness of doctors in the UK to practice, following complaints about misconduct, and can decide to strike them from the medical register, meaning they are unable to practice medicine.

She submitted her first complaint to the GMC in 2001, but felt unsupported by the council and distressed by the thought of having to go through another public hearing. As a result, the complaint never advanced.

She went on to make further complaints about the same incident in 2007 and 2015. On both occasions, the GMC declined to take further action due to a rule that it only routinely investigates allegations of sexual abuse that took place within the past five years.

The council does have the ability to waive the rule at its discretion, and confirmed to openDemocracy that it does investigate incidents from more than five years ago, where there are grave allegations and where it possesses the information it needs to carry out an investigation.

Despite its lack of action, in a 2016 email to Rose, the GMC acknowledged that “were we to look at this matter and apply today’s GMC fitness to practise investigative thresholds to it, we would carry out an investigation”.

The email, which openDemocracy has seen, further stated that her complaint “is considered to be serious enough to warrant an investigation (were we to look at the matter today)”.

“His lying has been abetted first by the NHS, and then by the GMC itself,” Rosa said.

Good news

openDemocracy has found that the GMC has rejected ten reports of sexual misconduct due to its five-year rule since May 2022, when Liberal Democrat MP Daisy Cooper raised the issue in Parliament.

Now, victims and survivors like Rose have some good news: the GMC’s regulations are set to change.

Last month, the government confirmed it “agrees” to all recommendations put forward by Lord Mann, whom it appointed to oversee a review of the GMC in autumn 2025. Mann’s recommendations include a proposal to remove “the current rule which prevents regulators from being able to consider fitness to practise concerns involving allegations of historic sexual abuse after five years have passed”.  

Cooper, who wrote to then health secretary Sajid Javid about the five-year rule in 2022, told openDemocracy the reform “could be a major breakthrough for women’s safety”.

She added: “I hope after all my campaigning, that victims, predominantly women, don’t have to wait much longer for change. This arbitrary rule has robbed these women from getting justice, and left other patients and staff at risk when perpetrators can not be struck off.”

“The five-year rule is an anomaly,” Rose said. “The police couldn't get away with this excuse to bury cases, the clergy couldn't, the BBC couldn't. The fact that the GMC, and not the other health regulators of lesser mortals, was still allowed to invoke it in 2026 is part of a pattern of caving to the legal and regulatory protection of very powerful males in society who sexually abuse, and the extraordinary lobbying power wielded by medical defence lawyers.

“No argument can be offered to justify this discrimination in favour of more powerful individuals, and of the continued relative leniency in handling senior male doctors over the years,” Rose continued.

Responding to the news, GMC chief executive and registrar Charlie Massey said: “Patients rightly expect assurance that doctors, PAs [physician associates] and AAs [anaesthesia associates] are safe to practise and can be held to account if serious concerns are raised. These proposed reforms will allow us to respond more quickly and flexibly when patient safety is at risk. This is an important and long-awaited step towards a more responsive and compassionate approach to healthcare regulation.”

One of the key issues with the rule is its failure to recognise why a victim may delay coming forward to report sexual abuse, said Lisa Durston, communications manager at the sexual violence charity SARSAS.

“We know that there are many reasons why survivors may not feel able to disclose sexual assault for a long time,” said Durston. “We also know that the small number of survivors who feel able to take the massive step of seeking justice through the criminal justice system, face a re-traumatising process with significant delays and often no positive outcome. It's a real concern that if survivors are turning to alternative routes, they find themselves timed out and thwarted whichever way they turn”.

While lifting the rule is a “great first step”, said Laura Parker, the chief operating officer for Rape Crisis England and Wales, there is more work to do to rebuild survivors’ trust.

“This rule was in place for a long time,” Parker told openDemocracy. “The reporting system was built on a linear, time-limited model that was fundamentally misaligned with trauma-informed practice, and risked excluding survivors from being heard, reinforcing institutional distrust. There are so many reasons why survivors might not report, from fear of not being believed to internalisation of blame and shame, all of which can discourage disclosure. Time limits structurally prevent trauma-informed practice.

“We need an appreciation that reporting and support for survivors is not linear, and that institutional structures that work in a non-trauma-informed way are still a deterrent. Survivors need to know that if they come forward, their complaint will be heard and dealt with in a trauma-informed way, including in a way that recognises why someone may delay disclosing abuse. We also need to recognise that survivors of sexual abuse need specialist support that recognises the realities of the trauma they have endured, which is why specialist services are so important.”

As for Rose, she continues to fight for recognition that she was a victim of a man who she alleges abused his power over her.

*Names changed to protect identity

Business is booming at Anacta Strategies, a lobbying firm that advised Labour in the 2024 election and has shown significant growth in its first full year of operations, newly filed company accounts reveal.

Anacta — which has close ties to Keir Starmer and describes itself as "the leading Labour-specialist advisory firm” — counts among its clients Pearson Engineering, an Israeli-owned defence firm which won a government contract worth £10m, its largest ever, with the Ministry of Defence last year.

It has also lobbied the government on behalf of Airbnb, Visa and Sky, according to the statutory lobbying register, but does not publish a full list of its clients and is not signed up to the industry’s voluntary code of conduct.

Anacta billed Labour £90,000 for campaigns and strategy advice as part of the party’s successful election campaign in 2024, according to Electoral Commission data, and retains close ties to the party. Anacta staff have held frequent meetings with several senior party figures since the election.

‘Corporate capture’

Founded by two lobbyists linked to the Australian Labor Party, Anacta’s first hire in the UK was Teddy Ryan, who left his role as a director of the Labour Party to join the company not long after the general election in 2024. Ryan had spent much of his time in the party developing its relationship with business, founding the Labour Business Network and organising the party’s first City business conferences. Anacta’s UK arm is a subsidiary of its Australian parent, which continues to support much of its operations as per company accounts.

Last November the firm hired Matt Faulding as senior counsel. Faulding, who previously served as secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party, is a close confidant of former Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and played a key role in the selection process for the general election.

Weeks into his gig at Anacta, Faulding hosted a private breakfast for clients and politicos at which Clare Reynolds — who served as No 10's political director until September that year, and remains a senior Labour official — offered attendees "invaluable tips on when, who and how to engage with No.10,” as the firm wrote on LinkedIn. The firm hosts monthly private roundtables like this for clients, oftentimes with MPs and Labour Party insiders.

There are rules designed to prevent people moving directly from government into lobbying, but because both Faulding and Ryan were employees of the Labour Party rather than the government, neither was subject to them.

The firm effectively leverages both professional and personal connections within the party. Reynolds, who still works for the party and attended the December breakfast event, is married to Labour's chief whip, Jonathan Reynolds. Anacta’s managing director Ryan is married to Labour general secretary Hollie Ridley. Both couples appeared in the recent Politico Power Couple rankings, ranked first and 38th respectively.

Another Anacta staffer, Kate Forrester, is married to the No-10 aide Paul Ovenden who resigned last September. Forrester joined Anacta from APCO, the PR firm at the centre of the Labour Together scandal. Forrester ran APCO’s London public affairs team when Labour Together commissioned the firm, leading them to investigate journalists including Paul Holden over their reporting on the group’s finances.

The firm publishes limited accounts, but its most recent books give an indication of the scale of Anacta UK's growth in its first full year under a Labour government: Outstanding invoices stood at £210,123 by June 2025, up from £700 the previous year not long after its launch. To be clear: outstanding invoices offer a very limited snapshot of dues still owed to the firm at the close of the financial year, not the total business booked in that period. Even so, the sharp increase suggests a significant uptick in business.

The firm has registered more clients with the statutory watchdog since the period covered by these accounts, suggesting it has continued to grow.

Labour MP Jon Trickett, who has long argued for sweeping reform to reduce conflict of interests around the so-called ‘revolving door’ between government and big business, told openDemocracy: “In a democracy, power and influence is supposed to be exercised by the voters. But when private wealth and big corporations capture the state then democracy itself is subverted.

“This corporate capture occurs in a variety of ways, one of which is the revolving door whereby one day someone is ensconced deep in political structures and shortly afterwards the knowledge and contacts they have acquired are on offer to the highest bidder.”

‘Gaping holes in the system’

Opposition MPs have raised questions in parliament about Anacta's access to government, with Conservatives John Glen and Mike Wood asking ministers whether Anacta's representatives met with any special advisers in either the Treasury or Downing Street. The government did not offer a meaningful response.

The statutory definition of lobbying which triggers a requirement to register with the official watchdog, the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, does not include lobbying of special advisers — political appointees like McSweeney who often wield significant influence in government but do not have the statutory power of either elected ministers or civil servants.

Newly released government transparency data shows that Anacta hosted McSweeney for lunch in mid-December – recorded only as hospitality, meaning there is no indication of the purpose of this meeting. The firm also attended a roundtable last May with then-tech secretary Peter Kyle, involving Pearson Engineering, fintech firm Revolut and Amazon Web Services.

Unlike many of its competitors, Anacta is not a member of the PRCA's Public Affairs Board and is not signed up to its Code for Professional Lobbying — the lobbying industry's own voluntary ethical standard. It has this in common with the other major Starmerite lobbying firm, Arden Strategies. Lobbyists not signed up to this code are not required to publish a full list of their clients, only those on whose behalf they carry out lobbying activities which meet the narrow statutory definition required to register with the official watchdog.

Kamila Kingstone, programme director at Spotlight on Corruption, said this case shows that “the current framework for lobbying transparency is not fit for purpose”.

She said: “Anacta Strategies is yet another example of why comprehensive lobbying regulation is urgently needed. When a firm created by well-connected former party staffers can operate outside any code of conduct and lobby special advisers without triggering transparency requirements, it exposes gaping holes in the system.

“The public deserves to know who is influencing government. If we are serious about restoring trust in politics, we need stronger, more comprehensive rules that bring all lobbying into the light and ensure fair access to government decision-makers.”

Anacta Strategies did not respond to a request for comment.