Ladder
Ladder: prior restraint
An order or rule that stops something from being published before it appears, rather than penalising it afterwards. Examples are boards that must approve articles, books or films before release, court injunctions against publication, and rules that require officials to review material before it is published.
The number of entries reflects the depth of this record, not the severity of a country's conduct.
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1Restrict
Limiting access or credentials for particular reporters or outlets: bans from briefings or buildings, pool changes, credential revocations, accreditation refusals.
Ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon assigned about 600 journalists to travel with United States military units under written ground rules restricting what they could report about troop numbers, operations and casualties.
Sustained 14 April 2003 · 1 source · Full entry
Reporting in 2020 found that political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote or edited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public coronavirus guidance and its weekly scientific bulletin before release, bypassing the agency's normal scientific review.
Unknown · 2 sources · Full entry
On September 19, 2025, the United States Department of Defense, the federal department that provides the country's military forces, issued new credential rules for reporters at the Pentagon, its headquarters building, under the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Ongoing 9 April 2026 · 5 sources · Full entry
2Pressure
Using state power short of prosecution to change coverage: regulatory threats, licence reviews, funding cuts, lawsuits by officials, official "fake news" or "foreign agent" labels, advertising pressure, tax audits.
Twelve days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship.
Sustained 28 September 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
Egypt's Supreme Council for Media Regulation required news websites to obtain a government license to operate, and independent outlet Al-Manassa's application, filed in 2018, went unanswered for more than two years.
Note: A national council required a license before a news site could operate at all and left the application unanswered for years rather than approving, denying or fining it.
Ongoing 26 October 2020 · 2 sources · Full entry
India's Income Tax Department searched BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai for alleged tax evasion, three weeks after the government used emergency powers to block a BBC documentary examining Prime Minister Narendra Modi's response to 2002 communal violence.
Unknown · 1 source · Full entry
Türkiye's broadcast regulator, RTUK, fined three television channels and suspended the next five episodes of two of their programs after they aired criticism of the government's response to the February 2023 earthquakes.
Note: A national regulator barred two programs from airing at all for five future episodes over their earthquake coverage, a forward restriction rather than a single broadcast ban.
Sustained 22 February 2023 · 2 sources · Full entry
India's 2023 amendment to its Information Technology Rules empowered a government-run Fact Check Unit to label online content about the central government 'fake' or 'false' and require its removal; comedian Kunal Kamra and media groups challenged it, and the Bombay High Court struck the rule down a…
Reversed 20 September 2024 · 2 sources · Full entry
3Punish
Legal or physical action against individual journalists or sources: subpoenas and record seizures, prosecutions, arrests, detention, expulsions, visa denials, assault where a government actor is involved.
4Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
A Hennepin County attorney used Minnesota's 1925 Public Nuisance Law to shut down The Saturday Press, a Minneapolis paper accusing officials of corruption.
Reversed 1 June 1931 · 1 source · Full entry
The city of Griffin, Georgia, required written permission from the city manager before anyone could distribute pamphlets, circulars or magazines within its limits, treating unlicensed distribution as a punishable nuisance.
Reversed 28 March 1938 · 2 sources · Full entry
After The New York Times began publishing a leaked secret history of the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration obtained a court order stopping further publication, the first such order against a major American newspaper.
Reversed 30 June 1971 · 2 sources · Full entry
On October 27, 1975, Nebraska District Judge Hugh Stuart ordered news organizations covering a mass murder near Sutherland, Nebraska, not to report a suspect's confession or other evidence before jury selection.
Reversed 30 June 1976 · 2 sources · Full entry
In November 1990, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida ordered Cable News Network to stop broadcasting tape recordings of jailed former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega's telephone conversations with his defense lawyers.
Upheld by a court 18 November 1990 · 2 sources · Full entry
Weeks after Britain entered the First World War, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the House of Commons that the Official Press Bureau was the sole channel through which the Admiralty, the War Office and other departments released naval and military information to newspapers.
Sustained 12 November 1914 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1922, Soviet Russia created Glavlit, a single agency that reviewed newspapers, books, plays and even posters before they could be printed or performed.
Ongoing 1 January 1989 · 2 sources · Full entry
Portugal's government, led by Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, had restricted the press since a 1926 military coup while officially denying it did so.
Reversed 25 April 1974 · 2 sources · Full entry
After Japan's war with China escalated into full scale conflict in July 1937, the government invoked Article 27 of the Newspaper Law to require government clearance before publishing war related news, while a Home Ministry directive to local officials banned the printing of what it called "fallacie…
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
While Spain's civil war continued, the Nationalist government led by Francisco Franco enacted a Press Law in April 1938 requiring government permission to found a newspaper, work as a journalist or direct a paper, alongside continued pre-publication press controls and years-long prison terms for va…
Reversed 1 April 1977 · 1 source · Full entry
President Getúlio Vargas created the Department of Press and state messaging in 1939 during Brazil's Estado Novo dictatorship, giving the government direct control over what newspapers, radio and film could publish.
Reversed 1 January 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
Canada invoked the War Measures Act at the outset of the Second World War and used it to bring in the Defence of Canada Regulations, which gave the government power to review and restrict hundreds of newspapers and periodicals and to ban dozens of organizations, including the Communist Party of Can…
Sustained 31 December 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
The collaborationist government installed in occupied Greece created a Directorate-General for Press and Radio to take over and expand the prior review powers of the prewar Metaxas dictatorship, requiring official permission before films, plays, music, and publications could reach the public.
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Australia's wartime government, under Prime Minister John Curtin, controlled press coverage of military events through the Department of Information.
Reversed 18 April 1944 · 2 sources · Full entry
When Israel declared independence in 1948 under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, it retained a British Mandate-era Press Ordinance giving the military the power to review and restrict publications on security grounds, later formalized through an Editors' Committee that let most Israeli newspapers s…
Ongoing 1 January 1989 · 1 source · Full entry
Under Prime Minister Daniel François Malan, South Africa's parliament approved the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, defining communism broadly enough to cover most opposition to apartheid.
Reversed 31 July 1991 · 4 sources · Full entry
Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20-21, 1968 to end the Prague Spring, a period of liberalization under Alexander Dubček that had included the lifting of press controls.
Reversed 1 November 1989 · 2 sources · Full entry
On the night of December 13, 1968, Brazil's military government, led by President Artur da Costa e Silva, decreed the Fifth Institutional Act, suspending constitutional guarantees and recessing the national Congress.
Unknown · 2 sources · Full entry
President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972, and the next day ordered the military to take over nearly every newspaper, radio and television station in the Philippines, jailing prominent publishers and editors and requiring government clearance for whatever remained.
Reversed 25 February 1986 · 2 sources · Full entry
On November 17, 1972, the Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench Division, part of England's High Court, granted the Attorney General's request for an injunction stopping The Sunday Times from publishing an article about the drug thalidomide, on the ground that it would amount to contempt of court.
Reversed 26 April 1979 · 2 sources · Full entry
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency on June 25, 1975, and the next day her government imposed pre-press controls on every Indian newspaper, requiring official clearance before publication and later forcibly merging the country's news agencies into one.
Reversed 21 March 1977 · 1 source · Full entry
After crushing the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, Burma's new military government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, tightened an existing pre-publication press controls board and raised penalties for unauthorized publishing to seven years in prison, while denying any press controls existe…
Ongoing 1 January 1989 · 2 sources · Full entry
Home Secretary Douglas Hurd directed British broadcasters in October 1988 not to air the voices of representatives of Sinn Féin, a party linked to the Irish Republican Army, and other groups linked to violence in Northern Ireland.
Reversed 16 September 1994 · 1 source · Full entry
An Israeli judge ordered Israeli media barred from any mention of a prisoner held under a false identity, or of the order itself, applying a system under which security-related stories must be reviewed and cleared by the military before publication.
Note: A court order barred any domestic mention of a named prisoner's case or of the order itself, backed by a standing system requiring advance approval of security reporting.
Unknown 1 June 2010 · 3 sources · Full entry
5Eliminate
Long imprisonment, killing, disappearance or forced exile of journalists, with state involvement as the sources state it.
All ladders · Prior restraint: by country and year · The United States chapter