Because Writers Speak their Minds: 50 years, 50 cases

'I vividly recall the wave of solidarity at the turn of the 1980s in protest against my imprisonment. There were protests from friends, playwright colleagues, writers, Amnesty International, and the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN...whenever some news did manage to find its convoluted way to me about performances, concerts or petitions in favour of Charter 77...it was always a source of great encouragement and elation in the oppressive conditions of Communist prison. Later...it was my turn to show solidarity with imprisoned colleagues' Vaclav Havel, Letter to WiPC, September 2009.

One bitterly cold day in the first week of January, the writer, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, and two fellow dissidents walked down a snow-edged street in Prague to deliver a letter to the Chinese Ambassador. Surrounded by a crowd of journalists and photographers, they rang the bell several times. No one came to the door, so they left their letter in the letterbox.

The letter from Havel and his friends, all co-signatories of Charter 77, requested a fair and open trial for the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, sentenced on 25 December 2009 to 11 years for being the co-author of Charter 08: '...We are convinced that this trial and harsh sentence meted out to a ...prominent citizen of your country merely for thinking and speaking critically about various political and social issues was chiefly meant as a stern warning to others not to follow his path.'

Havel (1979) and Liu (2009) are both emblematic cases in WiPC's year-long campaign celebrating 50 years in International PEN of defending freedom of expression. For each year between 1960 and 2009, one writer has been chosen whose case demonstrates the work of the Writers in Prison Committee. Albanian poet Musine Kokalari was serving a 20-year sentence for being an 'enemy of the people' when the WiPC was formed in 1960. Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien (1971) spent almost 27 years in prison for his 'politically irreverent poems'; Egyptian novelist and physician Nawal El Saadawi (1981) wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison during her incarceration for 'crimes against the state'; Ogoni environmental activist, novelist and dramatist Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged in 1995 in Nigeria despite unprecedented outcry over his summary murder trial. In 2008, young student Parwez Kambakhsh was sentenced to death in Afghanistan for blasphemy.

The stories of many other writers - including Brodsky, Rushdie, Nasrin, Soyinka, Portnoy, Breytenbach - and their own words have much to say about the nature of persecution and challenges to freedom of expression in modern times. These 50 have been chosen as representative of PEN's work; for each of them, there are hundreds more who have been imprisoned, killed, disappeared or otherwise punished simply for speaking their minds.

The beginnings of the campaign

In 2010, the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN celebrates 50 years of defending freedom of expression around the world with a year-long campaign - Because Writers Speak their Minds.

Freedom of expression has been a linchpin of International PEN since its formation in 1921. Concerns for colleagues imprisoned, executed, tortured through times of war, peace, revolution, and détente took the form of speeches at congresses, resolutions, letters of support, telegrams to offending governments and an embrace of exiled writers. But in 1960 this tradition of solidarity and compassion became, formally, a Committee.

On July 24, 1960, at a Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, General Secretary David Carver reported that a committee of three people had been empowered at a previous meeting to research and produce a list of imprisoned writers. The list circulated to delegates that day contained 56 names-seven writers imprisoned in Albania, 25 in Czechoslovakia, 13 in Hungary, two in France and nine in Romania.

Carver proposed that where there were PEN Centres, in countries 'where writers had been imprisoned because they spoke or wrote their minds', those centres should work to improve the situation and report to PEN. In countries where there were no centres, International PEN should act through a Writers in Prison Committee.

The Committee of three individuals is now a Committee of more than 70 PEN Centres worldwide. The annual case list often contains around 900 names of writers, editors, journalists, publishers and internet writers. Our central focus is the plight of persecuted individuals. We've always named names. And despite historical differences, our work is remarkably singleminded: Burning books and blocking blogs are one and the same.

Click here to read more about the 50 emblematic cases.