'I’ve lost four friends to political murder. I don’t want to lose any more', Benedict Rogers

Over the past two decades, four of my friends have been assassinated. I know still more who have received death threats or survived attempts on their lives.

The first death came on Valentine’s Day in 2008. Two gunmen came to the home of Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, general-secretary of one of Myanmar’s largest ethnic resistance groups. Mahn Sha – a civilian political leader, not a military man – was killed on the veranda where I had sat with him only three days earlier. As a result of my human rights work, I had come to know him quite well, visiting him each time I was in Mae Sot, the Thai town where much of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement is based. His murder would have shocked me at any time, but its coming so soon after I last saw him made it feel particularly poignant.

In March 2011, Pakistan’s minister for minorities affairs Shahbaz Bhatti was shot dead. I had worked closely with Shahbaz in his days as a grassroots activist courageously advocating for the rights of religious minorities. He had received death threats for some time, but requests for better protection were ignored. On the day Shahbaz was killed, his security detail had failed to show up to work.

In 2021, the Conservative MP Sir David Amess was stabbed during a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea. I had known David for over 25 years, campaigned for him, and worked with him on international human rights issues.

Then, earlier this month, Ann Widdecombe was murdered at her home in Devon. Ann had campaigned for me when I was Conservative parliamentary candidate for Durham in 2005; I interviewed her for my book about Catholicism, and we met from time to time, often together with David and Lord Alton of Liverpool, both her good friends.

There are, of course, other public figures who have been murdered in similarly cruel ways. In 2016, Jo Cox, a Labour MP known for her advocacy on behalf of refugees and migrants, was murdered in broad daylight on her way to a constituency surgery. I never had the privilege of knowing Jo, but we had mutual friends and common causes.

The sources of these acts of violence have been varied: dictatorships, radicals, political extremists. Violence is not the preserve of any one ideology. A far-right neo-Nazi killed Jo Cox, an extremist Islamist killed David Amess, and while the motives of Ann Widdecombe’s killer are still to be established, it is clear he hated her brand of politics. Mahn Sha was killed by men sent by Myanmar’s dictatorship, while Shahbaz’s assassins were Taliban sympathisers who detested his Christian faith and reform of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

From whichever direction it comes and whoever it targets, political violence is an assault on democracy and a threat to freedom.

Rigorous debate is at the heart of any democratic society. The freedom to express a diversity of ideas and cultures was exactly what Mahn Sha and Shahbaz gave their lives for. But for democracy to work, it must be based on three foundations: a respect for our shared humanity and the common good, the freedom to share ideas and argue the case for them, and an understanding that we resolve differences through debate, media scrutiny, the rule of law and – ultimately – elections, not violence. When the bullet replaces the ballot as the way of settling arguments, democracy is imperilled.

We should live by that old sporting expression and “play the ball, not the man”. The cut and thrust of political argument will at times lead to insult, but in recent years, language has become debased and deeply personal. During the Brexit debates, the term “traitor” was thrown around far too casually, and such language can lead to violence.

As Ann Widdecombe said at the Oxford Union in 2019, “Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offence, or from insult, or from hurt feelings. It is an occupational hazard of living in society.” Laws that seek to restrict free speech should be limited to those aimed at preventing libel or defamation, or incitement to violence and discrimination. Even laws tackling hate speech should be carefully defined. In countries like Pakistan, such laws are weaponised to cause division and violence, rather than counter them.

But no freedom is ever absolute, and freedom comes with responsibilities. We all must work to temper the toxicity that has infected our public discourse. We must be clear that political violence can have absolutely no place in any free society. I have lost four friends to a hail of bullets, stabbing and hammer blows. I do not want to lose any more.

This article was published in The Independent on 8 August 2026.

Photo: © European Union 2019, European Parliament, via Wikimedia Commons