On silencing the press in Ethiopia, being disabled in China, and Iran's shadow networks in Switzerland
DISPATCH №69
Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you summaries of three compelling articles from media beyond the Anglosphere. It’s our way of helping us all read the world a little differently.
First, we take you to Ethiopia, where a journalist has summarised a piece from The Ethiopian Reporter on the state’s renewed crackdown on press freedom amid simmering conflict.
From Chinese media outlet Minority Voices, contributing editor Billy Kin-Long sheds light on a story about disability rights – and wrongs.
And in German outlet NZZ, our editor-in-chief Charles Emmerson takes us through a story about the shadow networks of Iranian mullahs in Switzerland.
As always, if you have a story you’d like us to translate or summarise, please get in touch via The Translator Mag Hotline.
Silencing the press in Ethiopia
A crackdown on press freedom is intensifying in the Horn of Africa nation
Salsawit Baynesagn is the latest journalist to be detained in Ethiopia this month, according to an Amharic report from The Ethiopian Reporter, the country’s most popular newspaper. Her detention comes as a crackdown on press freedom intensifies in the Horn of Africa nation, where millions of people are facing famine and displacement as a result of endless conflicts – a narrative the government is intent on covering up.
Ethiopia has tumbled three spots since 2025 and now sits at 148th among 180 nations according to the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
The situation has worsened after a period of hope for journalists when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ascended to the Ethiopian premiership in 2018, promising a new era of media freedom after years of repressive rule. He won the Nobel Peace prize a year later and hosted UNESCO’s Global Freedom Day, declaring reforms that would enable full freedom of expression.
But the celebrations were short lived, as journalists and private media including The Reporter face harassment from Ethiopia’s Media Authority, which has silenced reporters and forced many outlets to shut down.
Baynesagn’s story is not an outlier, rather, it is reflected in the experience of many others in Ethiopia who are detained in local prisons with no court order and little communication with their family, friends and colleagues. The crackdown has forced many journalists to abandon their profession as it becomes increasingly dangerous to tell the truth.
And it’s not just local journalists – recently, international correspondents from the Economist and Africa Report were deported along with freelance reporters from the New York Times, and Le Monde for challenging the narrative of a government intent on telling an exaggerated story of development and growth.
Since February of this year, Reuters, one of the most visible news agencies operating in the region, has not able to report from inside Ethiopia, after the Media Authority declined to renew accreditation for its three Addis Ababa-based journalists.
Baynesagn’s colleagues say they have no idea of her whereabouts. She has not been presented in court and her capture by unidentified security personnel has sent shivers down the spines of some of country’s boldest and bravest journalists. If this trend continues, reporting on Ethiopia’s deepening crises – in Amharic or any other language – risks disappearing even further from public view.
The original article ‘ጋዜጠኛ ሳልሳዊት ካልተመለሰ የፍትሐ ብሔር ክስ መመሥረቱ ተገለጸ’ was first published in Amharic in The Ethiopian Reporter on June 17, 2026.
Headquartered in Addis Ababa, The Ethiopian Reporter publishes newspapers and magazines in Amharic and English. Its motto is “Free Press, Free Speech, Free Spirit”.
Summary by Rahel Assefa.
Beyond Good Intentions
What happens when helping disabled people in China becomes more about charity than equality?
Every year, China marks National Disability Assistance Day on the third Sunday of May with slogans about inclusion and support. Yet for many disabled people, these campaigns can be uncomfortable – not because of people’s desire to help, but the way such help is offered.
An article published by 少数派说 (Minority Voice), a Chinese platform focused on disability rights and lived experiences, asks a deceptively simple question: how can disability support lose its “爹味” – literally “fatherly flavour” – a contemporary Chinese expression describing a patronising attitude that assumes authority and the right to decide what is best for others?
For answers, the piece asks disabled people themselves – an obvious approach that is unfortunately too often missing from the narrative in Chinese and international media.
Some describe disability-related events that felt more performative than meaningful. One person recalls attending disability networking and matchmaking activities dominated by speeches, performances and group photographs, with little time for actual conversation. Another describes receiving community care packages stocked with rice, cooking oil and sunflower seeds. He did not cook, and the seeds required a level of dexterity he simply did not have. The problem was not the gifts themselves, they insist, but what they revealed: nobody had asked what disabled people actually wanted or needed.
Others point to a deeper issue: disabled people are often treated as objects of care, which positions able-bodied as superior. One contributor recalls attending a health check organised by a disability federation, only to find that the coach provided was not accessible. Along the way, staff from the federation openly complained about how troublesome it was to travel with disabled people, seemingly oblivious to the cruel irony.
The article is particularly critical of the language of charity. Slogans such as “有爱无碍” (Love knows no barriers) may sound warm-hearted, but several interviewees argue that accessibility is not merely an act of kindness – it is a right. Initiatives that present equal access as generosity risk obscuring that distinction.
What, then, would better support look like? Many of the contributors return to the same themes: make accessibility a priority from the outset; ask disabled people what they actually need; involve them in organising and decision-making; create more opportunities for disabled and non-disabled people to meet and understand one another; and support communities led by disabled people themselves.
Summariser’s Note: Throughout this discussion, contributors use the language of “rights” in a broad social sense. Their argument is not focused on disability law, but on a shift in perspective: accessibility should be treated as something people are entitled to as equal members of society, rather than a form of benevolence bestowed by others.
The original article ‘少数派说｜助残怎样「去爹味」?’ was first published in Chinese by 少数派说 (Minority Voice) and archived by the China Digital Times on May 17, 2026 on a WeChat Official account. It brings together reflections from contributors identified by their online screen names, including 树上的小鸟, 小林子, Deng, 在路上, 芳春木, and 沈丞晴.
Minority Voice is a Chinese-language platform focused on disability rights, accessibility, and the lived experiences of disabled communities in China.
Summary by Kin-Long Tong
An Iranian shadow network, or a mirage?
An investigation by one of Switzerland’s leading newspapers raises as many questions as it answers
The daughter of a former candidate for the Iranian presidency, and student at one of Switzerland’s leading universities. A member of the Basij – the volunteer militia Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – who later set up a tourism company. Another former student of the same university, accused of smuggling high-tech items used in Iranian drones.
A highly suggestive article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Fabian Baumgartner, Florian Schoop, Jan Ludwig (with arresting illustration by Anja Lemcke) draws together these biographies to paint a shadowy picture – the article uses the word “Schattennetz”, meaning shadow network – of Iranian regime influence in Switzerland. It’s a familiar tale: an authoritarian regime under sanctions exploiting the relative openness of democratic societies and their institutions to conduct espionage and keep tabs on its citizens (and non-citizens) abroad.
The NZZ investigations leads its reporters first to the letter boxes of a residential block of flats outside Lausanne where they find the name Arash Rezani. According to the article, Rezani came to Switzerland in 2011 to study for a PhD at the EPFL (the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne). He has since become a Swiss citizen and works at an innovation centre on microtechnology.
But there’s more to Rezani than this dry professional resumé. On Telegram he used a photo of General Qassem Soleimani – who ran Iran’s undercover military operations until assassinated by the US in 2020 – as his own profile picture. His LinkedIn posts suggest a strong political affinity with Gaza. His wife is said to be the daughter of a professor who teaches at an Iranian university closely linked to the IRGC.
So far, so circumstantial.
But the plot thickens. While her name isn’t on the letter box, the daughter of an Alireza Zakani – a former presidential candidate, and current Mayor of Tehran – is registered as resident at the same Lausanne address. Her life in Switzerland was once a political liability for her father. NZZ notes an online broadcast he made in 2021 claiming his daughter had returned to Iran after completing her degree (also at the EPFL). The article suggests that isn’t correct: as of 2023 she was working for a Swiss technology company.
Another name crops up, that of Eshraf Madani, yet another EPFL graduate. Here, the evidence of direct personal links to the misdeeds of the Iranian regime, if not individual malfeasance, is clearer. Madani outed himself as a former member of the Basij militia – essentially the regime’s day-to-day volunteer enforcers – by signing a letter (in Iran) celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution (including his EPFL affiliation). He now works at the same Swiss research centre as Rezani.
The article does not contend that any of these people have broken any Swiss laws. Links between members of any country’s elite living abroad are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, it notes the undoubted fact that “historically, technology transfer to Iran has taken place via scientists and engineers”. The nature of espionage operations is often precisely their opacity and deniability. The fact that there is such a cluster of individuals in Lausanne should, at the very least, raise questions. Civilian technologies often have military applications.
As if to show where all this might go, the NZZ cites the case of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, an EPFL graduate accused of smuggling electronic components to Iran under cover of various Swiss companies (including a start-up advised at one point by the local economic development agency) and his academic research (motion sensors for equestrian sports!) Having been arrested in Milan in December 2024, he was eventually returned to Iran on a plane linked to the Italian intelligence services, in what appears to have been a swap for an Italian journalist held by the Iranian authorities.
In recent years, the EPFL and another leading Swiss research university, ETH Zürich, have said to have beefed up their background checks on applicants from Iran and Russia. Some have been rejected on security grounds. The Swiss spy agency is doing the rounds of universities and companies talking about the risks of espionage.
But, as the article alludes, this may be only the tip of the iceberg. Transnational repression is a real phenomenon: whereby authoritarian regimes attempt to chill dissent abroad by using pro-regime members of the diaspora as “policemen”. It has been suggested that a Europe-wide rise in attacks on Jewish sites has been supported, indirectly, by Iranian regime agents. Switzerland’s spooks have warned of possible Iranian sabotage operations – something Russia has been doing in Europe for a while.
Again, NZZ offers no evidence anyone named in the article has been involved in any such activities. It doesn’t need to. The suggestion is enough.
The original article ‘Das Schweizer Schattennetz der iranischen Mullahs’ by Fabian Baumgartner, Florian Schoop and Jan Ludwig was first published in Germany by NZZ on March 31, 2026.
NZZ is a leading Swiss newspaper.
Summary by Charles Emmerson
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