A year ago, I was in Zagreb, speaking at a literary conference. I knew many of the participants, but there were many more in the hall, among the hotel employees, and in the surrounding areas who I did not know. The Croatian capital was once part of Yugoslavia, a country that was part of the Soviet Bloc and at the same time attempted to be neutral; under Marshall Tito, it tried playing a delicate balancing act.

A few people loitered in the background, some taking photographs. Were they curious tourists? Informers? Journalists? I had no idea. Like with the story of the eavesdropper in the German film, The Lives of Others, you never knew who was listening to you and what happened with that information.

The Cold War years had prepared us to live with such inconvenience. Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I remember meeting the director of the Shanghai Literature Festival at a hotel in Shanghai. With her eyes, she pointed two men at a table away from us. They were keeping an eye on us, and the flowerpot we had on our table may have a microphone. She happened to be of Indian heritage, so we spoke in Hindi for a bit, and then decided to go for a brisk walk through the city so that we could talk unobserved; those men hurriedly paid their bill and tried to keep pace, but they lost us.

In 2012 in Yangon during my first visit to Myanmar, I was travelling with a colleague, and we did what we were taught needed doing when you met in closed societies – go to our hotel room, turn on the television set, put it on at full blast, and talk to each other in whispers about who we were planning to meet and when. Rooms can be bugged, so we let them listen to loud music from cartoons, while we planned our days. Indeed, when I lived as a reporter in Singapore, my friend Iain Simpson, who was BBC’s correspondent for Southeast Asia, had this memorable advice to me: assume that everything you say on the phone is probably listened to by someone who you don’t want to be listening; assume that everyone you meet could be an informer. Then you won’t have to remember what you had said to whom. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said. Trusting people will take time. I lived eight years there, and that advice was sound, for many places, not just Singapore.

Journalists, human rights defenders, some academics, diplomats, human rights investigators, and those committed to seeking justice are familiar with these tricks. But we now live in a time that cannot be divided so easily between democracies and autocracies; we must assume that every society imposes surveillance. In our democratic societies too, leaders tell us that surveillance is good for us. I remember Carl Bildt, at that time Sweden’s foreign minister, telling the Stockholm Internet Forum a few years ago that if you lived in a democracy, you should not worry about surveillance. This apparently Orwellian remark was, at one level, quite sensible: a democratic society is built on safeguards and checks and balances, such as rule of law, lack of arbitrariness, due process, and legally-authorised surveillance, which dictatorships or flawed democracies lack. When I mentioned this to a human rights activist in India, she laughed; she said, if you live in a society with surveillance, you aren’t in a democracy.

Her point is valid. But we must reckon with the fact that governments have the obligation to protect human rights of all, which includes taking steps to prevent unrest, to stop terrorist acts, and to foil anti-democratic forces plotting to overthrow a duly elected democracy. Human rights law understands that, and human rights mechanisms have provided four conditions under which surveillance can take place.

It should be necessary and the necessity should be demonstrated;
It should be proportionate to the threat posed;
It should be duly authorised, under the law, by a recognized entity, and not arbitrary; and,
It should be time-bound and not allowed to continue in perpetuity. 

Necessary, proportionate, authorised, time-bound.

Those are reasonable restrictions permissible under human rights law.

But companies like NSO and products like Pegasus, ensure that we are not safe from surveillance: not our computer hard-drives, not the data we store in the cloud, not the conversations we have on the phone, nor our password-protected emails. Such software has enabled governments to plant evidence in people’s hard-drives with dubious data, as if to implicate them in violent conspiracies. In the past, an intelligence operative came and left incriminating evidence on your desk while you were away, and then you got raided and arrested; now a rogue software program does that more efficiently, without leaving fingerprints.

What has changed is that in many societies people have learned to accept it. An Iranian human rights defender, who campaigns for women’s rights, told me that the only Internet she know is the complicated one, where communication is on Jitsi; documents are exchanged on password-protected anonymous sites; calls are made on signal; two-factor notification is a given; emails are sent on Proton; and the virtual private network, or VPN, is the preferred way to get online. But most people prefer the ease that social media companies and internet providers offer, and settle for simplicity over remembering complicated instructions and passwords. It is worth reflecting on what Benjamin Franklin had observed and paraphrase it: those who are willing to trade precious liberty for temporary safety, deserve neither liberty, nor safety – those who are willing to trade privacy for ease online, get neither privacy nor ease. Their expression becomes tradeable data; their opinions become easier to manipulate; they trust the WhatsApp forward they get, and not traditional media.

The keepers of our data don’t care about us. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he said he would fight for free speech – he meant free speech of those he agrees with or those whose views he does not mind, such as Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump. He did not mean everyone. In some countries, the new Twitter, known as X, has capitulated and removed or banned several accounts because the government asked for it, saying he’d prefer compliance over grandstanding, because the company did not want its staff to get jailed.

Tech companies now report how often they get government requests to close certain accounts, and in some instances they do resist. They also mention when they receive requests to shut down networks, and occasionally they push back. But it is not enough; it still leaves us, those who seek justice, those who fight for human rights, those who are witnesses, observers, investigators, and storytellers, vulnerable. And when things get really tough, the companies leave, as Telenor has done in Myanmar.

Vladmir Lenin had asked once: What is to be done?

Those who fight for justice and speak truth to power are the first to be targeted – the tall bamboo shoot is the first to get chopped. Last year, Viduthalai Sigappi, a poet who also works in the Tamil film industry, wrote a poem about manual scavengers in India. These women and men collect and clean human waste, and are, almost all of them, from the Dalit communities, as the groups formerly known as ‘untouchables’ are known. It is a grave social injustice that has persisted for millennia. India has passed laws, but the practices continue. Their conditions are dire; many women and men often die – either through disease, or because of the hazardous conditions in which they work.

To mark the Dalit history month, the poet wrote a satirical poem, Malakuzhi Maranam (Manhole Deaths) in which he wrote of characters with names of Hindu gods, Rama, Lakshmana, and Hanumana – enter a manhole, while a woman known as Sita looks on. That was enough for a right wing Hindu organization called Bharat Hindu Munnani to file a police complaint under laws which India inherited from the colonial period – S 153 (about provoking with an intent to cause riot), 153A (1)(A) (about promoting religious enmity), 295A (outraging religious sentiments), 505(1)(b) (inciting fear or alarm among the public), and 505(2) (promoting enmity between groups).

Such cases happen with disheartening frequency. Free speech organisations took up the case and defended the poet. But in many societies, the process of prosecution is itself a punishment and many writers and activists feel despair because of the relentless regularity with which such assaults occur. Writers’ organisations have organized pickets in front of foreign embassies, to embarrass those governments. I have stood in front of the Russian embassy in London seeking Oleg Sentsov’s freedom, and seen men in dark glasses walk intimidatingly towards us, staring at us, from the footpath next to the embassy. When I stood in front of the Saudi embassy, protesting the detention of Ashraf Fayadh and Raif Badawi, a man from the Saudi embassy came out and started taking our photographs. So I decided to return the favour, and began photographing him. He quickly went back inside the embassy.

Conversations with imprisoned writers, and I have had the privilege of knowing some of them, have convinced me that international solidarity helps. A quote that never ceases to inspire me is what Alain Mabanckou wrote once. The Cameroonian poet Emoh Meyomesse had been in jail for a long time. While in prison, the French writer Mabanckou wrote a letter to him, which is illuminating because it shows that when a government jails a poet, it jails much more than an individual: Mabanckou wrote:

Well, you are not alone in this captivity, because when writers are thrown in prison, they are followed in their cells by an army of readers and the loud footsteps of their outraged colleagues. It is with this optimism in mind that I am writing this letter to you, to remind you that we will never cease to speak your name and to denounce, from every rooftop of the world, the injustice that befell you and the contempt shown by the justice system towards you.

By imprisoning a writer, they are playing with fire: how could they build walls around our imagination, when they know it has a pair of giant wings and that it sings, in every season, its hymn to freedom?

We are spreading your words to the four corners of the earth, to remind the enemies of free speech that an invisible and invincible army is on its way, using words to tear down every one of the barriers keeping mankind from progress.

When a government jails a poet, it is not merely the poet that the government has sought to silence – it has also tied its own hands.

A few years later, after he was released, I met Meyomesse in Rotterdam. He had a warm sense of humour, and he taught us the term, VIP, to mean Very Important Prisoner – his jailor was shocked that he was getting letters from everywhere in the world. Why, he asked him – are you a VIP? Yes, I am; a very important prisoner, he said.

Can you write to them you are being treated well, he was asked.

I will, once I am treated well.

His requests for books were immediately approved.

There are other examples of solidarity seeking justice: the letter the Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote to the Bangladeshi photographer/writer Shahidul Alam, was one such, eventually leading to his release; his response to her, and their emotional meeting in Dhaka. At the International Cities of Refuge Network meeting in Brussels last year, I met Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent many years in Guantanamo prison and was finally released. His compassion and commitment remain exemplary. And then there is the hero of our age, Salman Rushdie, so brutally attacked a year ago, who has always been willing to intervene and write in support of justice when asked, to help a writer anywhere, any time. He has spoken out for poets and writers in Bangladesh, South Africa, India, and beyond with unfailing consistency.

There is much we can do to help these writers facing injustice. We can lobby our politicians to extend refuge to such writers. We should demand fair trials and access to those trials. Where possible, we should write to them. We should bear witness, read their books, listen to their stories, hold public readings. The poet Caroline Forche defines what she does as the poetry of witness: “The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion.” As she wrote in her famous poem, about an encounter with a general, “what you have heard is true…. “Something for your poetry, no?” And she writes: “Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.”

We have to become those ears to the ground, the eyes that see even when blindfolded, the tongues that speak long after they have been lacerated, and the minds that can’t be caged. We must hold the umbrella in Hong Kong, use the cell phone in Cairo, and support the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen.

Albert Camus comes to mind: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” I began by writing about that hall in Zagreb; let me end by recalling what the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, said: “No one is interested in real victims, or real criminals. Not local courts, not their fellow citizens, not publishers, and not readers. Everyone simply refuses to believe them. An imaginary crime is much more convincing; reality is too real. They can only identify with an invented crime, only paper evil can excite them.”

Let them watch us. We will stare back.