The Maldives’ war against press freedom

On March 28, 2026, independent Maldivian media outlet Adhadhu released a thirty-minute documentary titled "Aisha."

It featured an anonymised interview with a woman who described herself as a 22-year-old single mother and a former administrator at the President's Office. She claimed to have had a sexual relationship with President Mohamed Muizzu, saying the affair took place shortly after she joined his office.

President Muizzu has dismissed the allegations as baseless. What followed the documentary's release, however, has become far more consequential than the allegations themselves. It has become a test of whether the Maldives still possesses a functioning democracy capable of holding its most powerful citizen to account. 

The Aisha documentary was released days before a constitutional referendum that delivered a stinging midterm rebuke to Muizzu, with 69 per cent of voters rejecting a government proposal to align presidential and parliamentary election cycles. Critics had long argued the proposal was designed to consolidate executive power. The timing of the documentary and the scale of the referendum's rejection together revealed the depth of public disillusionment with the Muizzu administration. 

On April 27, police raided Adhadhu's headquarters in the capital city, Malé, and seized electronic devices under a court order issued following the documentary's release. The court warrant invoked qazf, the Islamic legal provision criminalising the false accusation of unlawful sexual intercourse. Following the raid, authorities imposed travel bans on Adhadhu CEO Hussain Fiyaz Moosa and Managing Editor Hassan Mohamed, and summoned senior staff for questioning. The message being delivered to Maldivian journalism was unmistakable. 

The situation escalated further on May 11, when Adhadhu journalist Mohamed Shahzan attended a presidential press conference and asked a pointed question. Shahzan asked why the President had repeatedly contacted the former President's Office staffer who features in the documentary, citing 58 calls from January to April 2025, including late at night and in the early hours of the morning. Muizzu refused to answer, accused the journalist of violating the Criminal Court's gag order on the case and ordered MNDF security personnel to remove him from the hall. The following day, a court sentenced Shahzan to 15 days in jail. His colleague Leevan Ali Naseer received a 10-day sentence, not for publishing the documentary, but for reporting on the existence of the gag order itself.

Adhadhu said the trials were conducted in secret, concluded within hours, and the journalists were given just two hours to find legal counsel with no opportunity to present a defence. "For the first time in our democratic history, journalists have been jailed for challenging the most powerful man in the nation," the outlet said.

The legal architecture enabling this suppression did not appear overnight. Parliament passed a media law in September, giving a commission stacked with government loyalists powers to fine, suspend and shut down outlets, while Muizzu's allies overhauled the Supreme Court the previous year, removing three judges in moves the former judges said were politically motivated.

The Maldives Media and Broadcasting Regulation Act, far from serving as a framework for responsible journalism, is being wielded as a weapon against it. The President's Office invoked articles 40 and 44 of the Act to ban Adhadhu and all its journalists from attending presidential press conferences indefinitely, a ban that will remain in place until the criminal proceedings against the outlet's leadership are resolved, which the government controls the pace of entirely.

The Maldives Media and Broadcasting Commission has ordered national compliance with the ban from every news outlet, while the Elections Commission has fined opposition parties for discussing the documentary's contents. The gag order issued by the Criminal Court, according to the Maldives Journalists Association, is unprecedented in scope. The MJA said the gag order, which bars the public from repeating the documentary's allegations, was unconstitutional and unprecedented, noting that past gag orders had been limited to preventing parties from debating legal details outside court. "Never before has the general public been entirely banned from discussing a case in its entirety," the MJA said. 

The government's response to this criticism has been to deny it is happening. Muizzu's spokesperson, Mohamed Hussain Shareef, has claimed that the criminal proceedings are not attacks on press freedom and that any attempt to portray them as such is politically motivated. He stated that the President welcomed scrutiny of his policies and that the government strongly believed in a free press as a cornerstone of democracy. These statements are difficult to reconcile with the simultaneous reality of journalists in jail, newsrooms raided, laptops seized, travel bans imposed, and an entire outlet barred from the official seat of government.

Democratic freedoms in the Maldives were earned through years of struggle against authoritarian rule. The current trajectory of the Muizzu administration suggests those freedoms are not treated as rights to be protected but as obstacles to be managed. The MJA's warning about the return of authoritarian characteristics to the Maldivian state deserves to be taken seriously, not just by Maldivians but by every nation and institution that considers democratic governance worth defending.