Artistic Freedom in the United States
Panel Remarks by Sanjay Sethi at the United Nations UPR side event: “State of Human Rights in the U.S.”
On the occasion of the 53rd session of the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group, and the re-scheduled review of the United States (10 November 2026), impacted people, elected officials and representatives of U.S. civil society gathered in Geneva to highlight the human rights crisis in the country, to challenge U.S. impunity and efforts to dismantle the multilateral system, and to call on the international community to intervene in light of U.S. non-cooperation.
Sanjay Sethi, Co-Executive Director of the Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) and Initiative pour la Liberté Artistique (ILA), delivered these panel remarks at the UPR side event “State of Human Rights in the U.S.”, held on 9 November 2026 at the United Nations in Geneva.
Panel Remarks
Thank you for the opportunity to speak on freedom of expression and more specifically artistic freedom in the United States. A special thank you to my fellow panelists. I am the co-executive director of Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI), an organisation dedicated to protecting free artistic expression. AFI was founded to provide legal and resettlement services to artists at risk and call States to account where they don’t uphold the right to artistic expression.
We did not think we would be here today, but nevertheless…here we are.
What we are seeing in the United States today is a sustained narrowing of the space for free expression — across journalism, independent media, academia, civil society, and cultural life.
The mechanisms are often the same. The actors are often the same. And the effects reinforce each other.
In journalism, press freedom has continued to decline. The United States now sits at 64th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker recorded more than 170 attacks on journalists in 2025, nearly double the previous year.
Major news organizations including CNN, Politico, and MS NOW have been barred from the White House press pool over critical coverage.
Federal efforts to restrict online activism, freeze funding for certain media and academic institutions, revoke media credentials, and weaponize independent agencies against disfavored outlets have intensified.
That is the environment inside which we work.
Our organization focuses specifically on artistic freedom but this issue does not exist in isolation from the rest of the free expression environment, and the mechanisms we document in the cultural sphere operate against journalists, scholars, and civil society actors in parallel ways.
To track interference in the arts and cultural sector, we created the Artistic Freedom Monitor, which systematically documents the laws, executive orders, regulations, and administrative measures that give the government leverage to restrict artistic freedom and the independence of cultural institutions.
The methodology grew out of our earlier work in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, where we detailed how restrictions on artistic freedom emerge not through a single dramatic act of censorship, but through the accumulation of funding decisions, leadership changes, and administrative rules that gradually reshape the cultural environment.
Nearly two years into the Trump administration’s second term, we now have enough evidence to see the scale of what is happening.
- 86 government measures limiting artistic freedom have been documented from January 2025 through September 2026
- More than $250 million in confirmed federal funding cuts affecting arts and humanities institutions, plus nearly $1.1 billion rescinded from public broadcasting.
- Federal arts and cultural grant terminations: 1,400 NEH grants (~$175 million), 564 NEA grants (~$27 million)
- 29 programs, exhibitions, or performances cancelled, removed, or censored as a direct result of government action.
- 6,780 unique book titles banned nationally during the 2024–2025 school year (PEN America).
- LGBTQ+ expression a sustained target: 23 laws and policies in 2025, and 79 percent of all measures tracked in the first quarter of 2026.
These numbers reflect pressure on what can be funded, what can be exhibited, what can be read, whose histories can be presented, who controls cultural institutions, and who is able to enter the country to participate in cultural life — at every level of government, federal, state, and local.
I want to focus on five developments.
First, executive power is being used increasingly to shape public history and cultural representation.
In 2025, Executive Order 14253 directed federal agencies and cultural institutions to address what the administration characterized as “divisive” or “anti-American” interpretations of American history.
We subsequently saw the removal of material addressing slavery, Indigenous history, climate change, and LGBTQ+ history at federally controlled sites.
At Stonewall National Monument, references to transgender people and activists were removed from official materials, and the Pride flag was removed under a broader National Park Service directive, although litigation resulted in a court-enforceable settlement restoring it.
At the Smithsonian, Executive Order 14416 directed federal officials in 2026 to use available authorities — including funding and contractual leverage — to address what the administration described as ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.
Officials threatened to withdraw artifact loans, procurement assistance, and discretionary grants.
Second, there has been sustained interference in the governance and independence of major cultural institutions.
The clearest example is the Kennedy Center.
In February 2025, President Trump removed much of the Center’s board, installed new trustees, and elected himself chairman.
The institution then entered a prolonged period of programming changes, artist withdrawals, leadership disruption, proposed renaming, closure plans, and litigation.
By 2026, a federal court had blocked the renaming attempt; litigation over the Center’s future remains ongoing.
Third, public funding has become one of the most consequential mechanisms of pressure.
The over $200 million in federal arts and humanities grant terminations cited above from the NEH and NEA account for a significant share of this impact, with litigation having blocked implementation of some of those cuts.
The administration also sought to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, resulting initially in the cancellation of approximately 1,200 competitive grants before a court ruling led to their restoration.
As mentioned, Congress rescinded nearly $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This move has been widely characterized as retaliation against public broadcasters for coverage the administration deemed insufficiently supportive. This effectively ended decades of federal support for NPR, PBS, and hundreds of public radio and television stations.
Fourth: restrictions on LGBTQ+ expression and the growing use of laws protecting minors to restrict access to art and literature.
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, there have been 11 new measures aimed to restrict LGBTQ+ artists’ ability to express themselves and participate in cultural life.
Nine bills advanced across five states in early 2026 seeking to impose criminal penalties relating to drag performance.
Librarians and educators have been threatened with criminal or civil liability.
And across our reporting period, we have documented a sustained wave of measures facilitating book bans, affecting works by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and other major writers.
In recent months those mechanisms have become increasingly institutionalized: Florida directed districts to audit collections against a statewide removal list, and Arkansas provisions exposing librarians to possible criminal liability were reinstated on appeal.
Fifth, the effect on international artists.
39 countries are effectively banned from entry and 75 others face extreme vetting.
One of the clearest artistic-freedom mechanisms is the screening of artists seeking to enter the United States for their political and ideological beliefs — which, over time, reshapes what cultural programming here can look like.
AFI has directly represented artists denied entry — or fearing denial — because of their political beliefs, advocacy concerning Palestine, trans rights, nationality, or criticism of U.S. policy. Arts organizations have cancelled or reconsidered programming involving foreign artists as a result.
A government does not need to censor a foreign artist’s performance if the artist cannot enter the country in the first place.
Across all of these developments, one larger pattern has become clear: government control is often being exercised through leverage rather than outright prohibition.
Funding is conditioned.
Grants are withdrawn.
Libraries face liability.
Immigration status becomes uncertain.
And professionals begin calculating the consequences of presenting contested work.
The purpose of these mechanisms is not simply to control institutions — it is to shape behavior.
Artists do not need to be formally censored to become silent.
They need only believe that speaking openly may cost them funding, institutional support, performance opportunities, employment, or personal security.
Artists and cultural workers we’ve interviewed have described modifying their work, avoiding certain subjects, or withdrawing from public engagement because they feared professional consequences.
This in effect is an anticipatory self censorship: the public sphere becomes smaller without a single formal act of censorship.
This is not only our assessment.
75 percent of Americans believe free speech in the United States is heading in the wrong direction. Half are extremely or very concerned about potential restrictions on free speech.
Courts have provided meaningful protection in several cases. But litigation is reactive.
It occurs after damage has been done, and results are uneven.
For the UPR process, five recommendations follow:
- The United States should end federal directives that condition cultural funding or institutional treatment on adherence to government-prescribed ideological or historical narratives.
- It should restore and protect independent public funding for the arts, humanities, museums, libraries, and public broadcasting, with decisions based on transparent professional criteria rather than political viewpoint.
- It should strengthen the institutional autonomy of bodies such as the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center, including transparent, merit-based governance that insulates artistic and curatorial decisions from partisan interference.
- Federal and state governments should protect the freedom to read and reject vague “harmful to minors” frameworks that expose librarians, educators, artists, and performers to criminal or financial penalties for constitutionally protected expression.
- And the United States should protect the mobility of international artists and cultural workers and ensure that immigration decisions are not used to penalize lawful political or artistic expression.
Artistic freedom sits at the intersection of freedom of expression, cultural rights, non-discrimination, and the right to participate in cultural life, and it should appear more consistently in the UPR itself.
Artistic freedom has not disappeared in the United States.
There remains strong resistance from artists, institutions, civil-society organizations, lawyers, state governments, and the courts.
But the cumulative evidence shows that the space for independent cultural expression is under sustained pressure.
And when these measures accumulate, they begin to change who can create, what institutions can present, whose histories are preserved, and what the public is able to encounter.
That is why artistic freedom is not a peripheral cultural concern.
It is part of the infrastructure of freedom of expression and democratic participation — and it belongs squarely within the international human-rights framework this process is charged with upholding.
Thank you.
