Isabel Hilton

Isabel Hilton is the editor of chinadialogue.net, and was editor and editor-in-chief of openDemocracy from March 2005-July 2007. She is a journalist, broadcaster, writer and commentator and has worked for and contributed to a wide range of international media, including the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the Economist, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta and the BBC. She has reported extensively from Latin America, South Asia, China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Isabel Hilton wrote The Search For The Panchen Lama (2000) and has co-authored other books, including The Falklands War (1982). She has reported several documentaries for the BBC, such as Caravan of Death (2001) and Petra and The General, an investigation of the life and death of Petra Kelly (1994).

An expert on Chinese affairs, Isabel Hilton holds a degree in Chinese from the University of Edinburgh and also studied at the Peking Language Institute and Fudan University in Shanghai. After working for The Sunday Times covering home and foreign affairs she joined The Independent in 1986 as Latin America editor. She was appointed European affairs editor and chief feature writer before leaving the newspaper in 1995. Isabel Hilton presented BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight from 1995 until 1998, then joined Radio 3's Night Waves. Isabel Hilton lectures extensively on foreign affairs on a wide variety of platforms. She is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British Association of China Scholars and has served on the advisory committee of the Latin America Bureau.

Recent articles

A regional crisis created mainly by disastrous Soviet policies will only be exacerbated by the challenges of climate change, a Kyrgyz water expert tells Isabel Hilton.

Behind the high walls of a hotel in Antigua, the tranquil colonial capital of Guatemala, as the more than 100 women participants moved into the third day of “redefining democracy” some 40 miles away in the modern capital Guatemala City, democracy did a little redefining of its own. It was precipitated by an event unusual even for Guatemala: the distribution at the funeral of a murder victim of a video in which the deceased, a respected lawyer, accused the president, his wife and his secretary of organising not only his own murder – he was shot on the streets of Guatemala City while riding his bicycle on Sunday - but the murders earlier in the year of two of his clients.

When men have done making war on each other and on each other’s women, many return to home to make war on their own. Aftermath is the neglected story of war: what happens to the guerrilla fighter after he lays down his gun? Or to the former soldiers with stories of horrors never told, men cast adrift from the companionship of shared military experience, alone with unspoken memories?

The evidence is that many come home to act out their nightmares through violence against women.

What can a government do to harass women fighting for their rights when they are not breaking the law? In Iran, according to Shirin Ebadi, Nobel prize winner, lawyer and human rights defender, one answer is to use the power of the courts against them. The Iranian delegation to the second meeting of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which opened today in Guatemala, was meant to have five members. Two of them were prevented from leaving the country. Narges Mohammadi, spokesperson for the Centre for the Defence of Human Rights and an award-winning human rights defender in her thirties, and Soraya Arzizpanati, a Kurdish Iranian journalist active in the campaign to clear land mines in Iran, had passed through passport control at Tehran airport, their exit visas safely stamped in their passports, when they were called back by the police. Their passports were confiscated and they were notified that both were subject to court cases. They will now face charges in the revolutionary courts.

The night the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in London, May 5th 1980 - a very wet bank holiday as it happened - I was entertaining the writer Marilyn French, who died last weekend, to a very expensive dinner in the Savoy. The choice of location was hers and the bill, fortunately, was picked up by my then employer, for whom I was to interview her.

It did not go particularly well. I was a big fan. Like many women of my generation, I had devoured The Women’s Room, French’s first novel. It read like a souped up fictional account of the insights that Betty Friedan had published in The Feminine Mystique a few years earlier. I was keen to meet the author.