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Stay tuned for pictures of the rallies!

Below is an open letter that will be handed to the Ambassadors to each of the eleven countries worldwide, in which demonstrations are to be held tomorrow in solidarity for Kareem:

Dear Mr. Ambassador:

We greet you in peace. Our reason for contacting you is the case of Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, a young Egyptian law student at Al-Azhar University who was recently sentenced to four years in jail over writing on his personal Weblog.

We do not condone everything Mr. Soliman wrote, but we do believe in his right to express his opinion. His controversial writing criticized what he felt was a lack of freedom on the campus of Al-Azhar and in Egypt in general. As if to prove his point, the Egyptian court sentenced him to jail for expressing those views.

We do not believe Mr. Soliman should be in jail for simply stating his opinion, and we believe the court’s decision reflects very poorly on the country of Egypt. A mistake has been made.

We call upon Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to do an honorable act and pardon Mr. Soliman. Since Mr. Soliman was sentenced to jail for one year for insulting the President, we hope President Mubarak will show that words do not hurt him and that Mr. Soliman can go free.

Thank you for your consideration and for transmitting our appeal to President Mubarak.

At Al-Masree Al-Yawm. Translation below!

Bloggers Demonstrating for Prisoners’ Release to Demonstrate At Ten Capitals Tomorrow

Muhammad Abdul-Khaleq Msahel
April 26, 2007

On the upcoming Friday, ten American and European capitals will be witnessing large-scale demonstrations in front of Egyptian Embassies. These demonstrations are in protest of limiting freedom of opinion and speech, repressing bloggers, and transgressing their blogs.

Global Voices, a Canada-based blog, is setting up the communications between the human rights organizations and all blogs around the world to gather in front of Egyptian Embassies in Vienna, Brussels, Ontario, Prague, Athens, Rome, Bucharest, Stockholm, and London, as well as the Egyptian Embassy Cultural Office in Washington.

Bloggers have invited others to participate in these demonstrations with the purpose of applying pressure on the Egyptian government to release jailed bloggers from prison, among them [Abdul] Kareem Nabeel, who is charged with insulting the President of the Republic and the Islamic religion.

Corrections:

- Global Voices Online is not based in Canada, but is rather an American-based international project of Harvard Law School.
- Global Voices Online has no association with our campaign.
- Berlin is also participating in tomorrow’s rallies.

We are happy to announce that about a dozen rallies will be held worldwide in support of Kareem Amer. If you happen to be near any of the locations listed below, we’d love you to join us on Friday, April 27!

(Want to help but can’t attend a demonstration? See our What You Can Do page!)

Note from rally volunteers: While we appreciate the support provided by organizations worldwide, everyone is participating first and foremost as a civilian, not necessarily as a member of a particular organization.

This list will be updated as we get more details. Stay tuned!

Country List:

Austria
City: Vienna
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Hohe Warte 50-54, A-1190 Wien (Map)
Time: TBA
Contact: David Maeir
(Top)

Belgium
City: Brussels
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Avenue de l’Uruguay 19, 1000 Brussels (Map)
Time: 3 pm – 5 pm
Contact: Pieter Cleppe, Jong VLD
Note: Please see announcement here (PDF)
(Top)

Canada
City: Ottawa, Ontario
Address: TBA
Time: TBA
Contact: Mohammed Shouman
Note: Facebook event here
(Top)

Czech Republic
City: Prague
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Pelléova 14, Praha 6 – Bubeneč, 160 00 (Maps here and here)
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Contact: Lamis Khalilova, Amnesty Czech
Note: Please see announcement (Czech, English) (PDF)
(Top)

Germany
City: Berlin
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Stauffenberg Str. 6-7, 10785 Berlin (Map)
Time: 11:00 am – 11:30 am
Contact: Bidjan Tobias Nashat, Hertie School of Governance
(Top)

Greece
City: Athens
Address: Egyptian Embassy, 3 Vasilissis Sofias Av., 106 71 Athens
Time: 6 pm – 7 pm
Contact: Fotis Perlikos, Liberal Alliance
(Top)

Italy
City: Rome
Address: Italian Parliament, Piazza Montecitorio – Roma (Map)
Time: 10:00 am – 10:30 am
Contact: Alberto Mingardi
(Top)

Romania
City: Bucharest
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Dacia Boulevard 67
Time: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm
Contact: Olga Nicoara
(Top)

Sweden
City: Stockholm
Address: Egyptian Embassy, Strandvägen 35 (Map)
Time: 12 pm (sharp)
Contact: Jonas Virdalm
(Top)

United Kingdom
City: London
Address: 216 South Street (Map)
Time: 3:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Contact: Andrew Perraut
(Top)

United States of America
City: Washington, DC
Address: Egyptian Embassy Cultural Office by DuPont Circle, 1303 New Hampshire Ave. NW (Map)
Time: 12 pm – 1 pm
Contact: Knud Edmund Berthelsen
Note: Facebook event here
(Top)

We are looking for volunteers to help us design fliers for the countries involved in order to publicize the Free Kareem rallies.

Please contact us if interested. We’d greatly appreciate any help.

Worldwide rallies in support of Kareem will take place on the 27th of April! Details will be posted as soon as they are finalized. Please stay tuned, plan ahead, and spread the word!

Just recently, Ana Ikhwan blogger Abdul Mon’em Mahmoud, who has previously expressed solidarity for Kareem, was arrested and is being held for at least two weeks pending an investigation. The Egyptian government is not taking lightly his blogging on security officials’ acts of torture, as well as random detentions suffered by Egyptians.

The Free Kareem Coalition expresses its deep concern for the detention of Abdul Mon’em and hopes for his release. A Web site has been set up campaigning for his freedom: الحرية لعبد المنعم (Arabic).

Reporters Without Borders weighs in:

Call for release of blogger who reports on torture of detainees

Voicing concern about increasingly repressive policies towards online dissent, Reporters Without Borders called today for the release of blogger Abdul-Moneim Mahmud, who was arrested on 14 April at Cairo airport. He has been charged with membership of an “illegal organisation” (the Muslim Brotherhood), but his arrests seems to be linked to the photos and reports about the torture of detainees that he has posted on line.

“This arrest comes two months after another blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, was sentenced to four years in prison,” Reporters Without Borders said. “These two young men hold very different views, but they have a common desire to denounce President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarianism and the constant human rights violations in Egypt. We hope the authorities will free them and undertake to respect the principle of the free flow of information online.”

The state prosecutor’s office in Shoubra Al-Khaima ordered that Mahmud should be held for at least two weeks while he is investigated for alleged membership and financing of an illegal movement. Many local sources say he has in fact been targeted for reporting arbitrary arrests and acts of torture by the security services on his blog, Ana Ikhwan, and on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website.

Mahmud covered demonstrations organised by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and circulated photos of police brutality on the Internet. Aged 27 and a journalism graduate of Cairo university, he is also a correspondent for the satellite TV station Al-Hiwar (The dialogue).

Suleiman, who is better known by his blogger pseudonym of “Kareem Amer”, was arrested on 6 November 2006 because of articles he had posted on his blog, in which he often condemned the government’s authoritarian excesses and criticised Egypt’s highest religious institutions, especially the Sunni university of Al-Azhar, where he studied law. He was sentenced on 22 February to three years in prison for “inciting hatred of Islam” and one year for “insulting” the president.

Egypt is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “13 Internet Enemies”. Read our weekly “blog review” and create your blog with Reporters without borders : www.rsfblog.org

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information: The Police Broke into a Journalist Blogger’s Residence Anxieties for a Torture Crime

Cairo On 14 April 2007

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information HRinfo expresses anxiety and fear for the life of the journalist blogger Abdel Men’em Mahmoud, in which on Friday dawn security forces in Alexandria broke into his residence to arrest him. The incident is a result to a campaign practiced by the police in Cairo and Alexandria to arrest 42 Egyptians suspected of belonging to the Muslim Brothers Group.

Security forces on Friday Dawn, broke into the residence of Abdel Men’em Mahmoud reporter of Al-Hiwar TV and administrator of the celebrate blog “Ana Ikhwan”
(http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com) to arrest him. However, Mahmoud was not home at this hour, and because he was tortured in a previous episode for 13 days before, he disappeared to make sure of the reasons for this campaign, which probably could be his activities in media coverage to police quelling practices against Muslim Brothers’ activists.

On the other hand, the 27 years old blogger Abdel Men’em Mahmoud has expressed to a friend his haziness between subjecting to torture similarly to 2003 incident
(” http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/2007/01/25.html) and fearing of terrifying his aged parents by the police to force him to surrender. However, he received news of the large number of armed forced broke into.

In light of HRinfo’s condemnation to “Dawn Visitors” system practiced by security forces which, was practiced on a wide range previously against political opposition, it calls upon the Minister of Interior and the General – Prosecutor to provide reasons for this new incident.
However, the blogger is not a student or a member in what the Interior Ministry claims of a sport show held by some Muslim Brothers’ students to be a “military training” and his activities is concentrated on media and writing on his blog.

Moreover, HRinfo calls upon all civil society organizations and independent media to join forces to stop the unjust campaign against activist, students and academics did not practice any wrong just adopting different ideas, which is a guaranteed right to all.

In another occasion, HRinfo invites bloggers, journalists and activists to join forces with the assembly organized today at 5 pm before Journalists’ Syndicate, by bloggers carrying computers’ “keyboards” to declare their denial to arresting bloggers and join forces with Abdel Men’em Mahmoud the journalist blogger.

The Economist: Bloggers may be the real opposition.

(Hat tip: Anca R.)

THEY call themselves pyjamahideen. Instead of galloping off to fight holy wars, they stay at home, meaning, often as not, in their parents’ houses, and clatter about computer keyboards. Their activity is not as explosive as the self-styled jihadists who trouble regimes in the region, and they come in all stripes, secular liberal as well as radical Islamist. But like Gulliver’s Lilliputians, youthful denizens of the internet are chipping away at the overweening dominance of Arab governments.

[…]

Such pinpricks have yet to puncture the dominance of any Arab state. But with internet access spreading even to remote and impoverished villages, and with much of its “user-generated content” pitched in pithy everyday speech rather than the high classical Arabic of official commentary, the authorities are beginning to take notice. In February, an obliging Egyptian court fired a shot across the bows of would-be web dissidents by sentencing 22-year-old Abdelkarim Suleiman to four years in jail. A law student in Alexandria, he had strayed by penning bitter critiques of Egypt’s main centre of Islamic learning, al-Azhar university, and of Mr Mubarak, and posting them on his personal blog.

Highlights:
A. Reminder: Worldwide Rallies on April 27 (Quick link)
B. What’s New with Kareem (Quick link)
C. Translations (Quick link)
D. Press Coverage (Quick link)
E. Blogosphere (Quick link)

A. Reminder: Worldwide Rallies on April 27
Rallies have been confirmed in major countries worldwide, including the Czech Republic, Canada, US, UK, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Romania. Any form of support from you, be it your presence in the rally, promoting it, or organizing one in your area, would be a great boost to our cause to free Kareem Amer. If you can help in any way, please let us know!

B. What’s New with Kareem
- Prosecutors Hindering Kareem’s Appeal Procedure

HRinfo’s lawyer, Rawda Ahmed, who is part of the defense team, has travelled to Alexandria many times to file the appeal. However, upon discovery that the appeal related to Amer’s case, the prosecution refused to process it.

- Kareem’s Case Highlighted at UN Human Rights Council

- Reporters Without Borders: Call to French president to lobby President Mubarak about press freedom

C. Translations

English Translations:

- Video Interviews with Kareem After Al-Azhar Investigation:

March 2006 Interview, Part I:
(Transcript here.)

March 2006 Interview, Part II:
(Transcript here.)

- Kareem’s First Letter from Prison (Written Last Year)

Excerpt:

I am not sad! I will never let them have the chance to psychologically ruin me by such arbitrary acts, which are mastered only by idiots. Such idiots have rigid thoughts with no power to stand firm against any free thinking that challenges well-established truths. They resort to full violence and cruelty to suppress it – an expression of their inability to confront it with counter thinking. The aim is to silence the voice of birds singing outside their own herd. They will never achieve such a goal!

Day after day, this impotent trick, adopted by Al-Azhar University by employing its barbaric and foolish acts, proves that Al-Azhar is nothing but an environment that spreads backwardness and ignorance. In addition, it keeps urging people to be satisfied with their disgraceful conditions. This is done through discouraging them from thinking, through disrupting their minds, and through chasing those who use their minds in questioning what is illogically imposed on them.

I announce, from my detention cell, that nothing and no one will ever make me submit. Even when my hands are in chains and my freedom of movement is denied, this will only make me stronger and more stubborn in my confrontation with the enemies of mankind disguised under the cover of religion.

- Kareem Amer: Al-Azhar University and Its Apartheid Policy between Male and Female Students: Shut Down Al-Azhar University

Excerpt:

This apartheid segregation policy has significantly affected the students. Al-Azhar University’s male students now look for anything to quench their strong sexual thirst. They do not leave any searchable thing without searching for its sexual indications; this search did not even exclude their academic books and lectures.

For example, we find them searching specifically in Islamic jurisprudence books for any phrase that refers to sex, sexual conditions, or the stipulations of extramarital sex and Islamic jurisprudence related to women. We find them heavily focused on these topics, and at the same time neglecting the rest of the important academic subjects whose topics do not necessarily bring up this matter.

During academic lectures, you can talk about this with no embarrassment. You find them, particularly in the Islamic jurisprudence lectures, trying to understand what the lecturer says in different ways, and they attempt to have him bring up thorny sexual topics while they are in a state of extreme sexual frenzy. They wait for these Islamic jurisprudence lectures with no patience so they can satiate their pervert sexual instincts by enjoying crude sexual phrases that the lecturer uses.

Italian Translations:

- Italian Translation of Kareem’s Final Blog Post

- Italian Translation of Al-Jazeera Article

D. Press Coverage
- Egypt Today: Down with the Pajamahideen

Excerpt:

We have a popular saying here in Egypt: idrab el-marboot, yikhaf el-sayeb, which basically means if you strike the one that is tied down, you scare off the free ones. In sentencing Amer to four years of prison, you scare all the other bloggers out there. Unimportant as his blog may have been in comparison with the blogs mentioned earlier, Amer gave the authorities the excuse they needed to scare off the more active bloggers, those whose work is more widely noted and who cannot be imprisoned because they largely focus on recording the truth. Although many of them have been arrested in the past, it was very difficult to build a case against them and they were consequently released.

- The Varsity: Jailed Egyptian Blogger An Example To Us All

Excerpt:

In pursuit of this objective, Kareem has used his website to speak out against gender inequality at his university (Al-Azhar University in Cairo) and criticize what he sees as the negative influence of Islam on Egyptian society. For this, the brave writer found himself expelled, chased by knife-wielding thugs while security officials stood aside, referred to the public prosecutor, charged, convicted, and sentenced to four years in prison for “inciting hatred of Islam” and “insulting” President Hosni Mubarak. Needless to say, freedom of expression is under attack in Egypt.

Since then, the case has spurred a global movement calling for his safe release and for free speech in general. Western media outlets, including the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Globe and Mail, Der Speigel, and many others have embraced Kareem’s cause by publicizing his tragic story. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders have condemned his imprisonment and are currently lobbying the Egyptian government for his release. Politicians from Italy and the U.S. have also joined the effort by sending official letters to Cairo calling for Kareem to be pardoned.

- The Nation: Mixed opinions after a decade of blogging

- USA Today: World’s ‘insult laws’ ensure that mum’s still the word

E. Blogosphere
- Global Voices Online: Lessons from the Free Kareem Campaign

Excerpt:

Lessons from Kareem

With such a complex mix of agendas and interpretations, however, it is perhaps more constructive to inquire about the “how” of this success. The lessons we can learn from this experience and from previous initiatives adopted by the highly organized and thriving Egyptian blogsphere [sic] are many. Here are a few of them:

• Setting up a standalone site or blog for each case is essential for a successful campaign. It serves as the public online face of the campaign; a space for providing information, updates, breaking news and links to other initiatives supporting the persecuted blogger or online writer.
• Showing photos of the individual and posting examples of his or her work (writings etc) helps personalize the case and puts a human face on the story. The person being persecuted or harassed is no longer just a name, but a human being and a focus for the public’s support and sympathy.
• In the era of Web 2.0, targeting blogging communities like Global Voices also helps guarantee success, since they help amplify the news and make it available to mainstream media and NGO’s who otherwise wouldn’t find them.
• Writing in English is crucial to reaching a wider community. Despite the existence of massive communities of bloggers writing in languages like Chinese, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., English remains a dominant an influential language in the blogosphere. To quote the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan: “If a news item isn’t written or printed in English…it has never happened.” *.

*We are Iran, The Persian Blogs, by Nasrin Alavi, Portobello Books, London, 2005, p. 344.

- CyberEgo: So, you think you can blog?

It’s common knowledge that the internet is under surveillance especially after the 11/9. What if a blogger satirizes or deliberately leaves threatening innuendos(even as a joke) for the U.S. external policy? Would that make him/her a suspect of a possible terroristic act? Is it possible that someone be forbidden to get a Visa for a country about which s/he expresses a negative opinion? I want to express such opinion about U.S., but I also want to get a Visa for it. I’m sure that someday we’ll be hired or fired because of our “blog views”. It has already happened, in a way, in the case of the Egyptian blogger, Kareem Amer, who has been imprisoned.

- Epichorus: كريم عامر

It takes a level of determination, conviction, and bravery that I can only hope to imagine, for an individual to speak this sort of truth in the face of such coercive power.

- The Blog of M’Gath: Turkey may censor Net access

Meanwhile, blogger Kareem Amer remains in an Egyptian jail for criticizing the gang in charge of his country.

In the Islamic world, we’re seeing two types of repressive governments: barbaric theocratic governments such as Iran’s, and authoritarian secular governments such as Egypt’s and Turkey’s — and, a few years ago, Iraq’s under Saddam Hussein. They aren’t very different in the end, but they’re violently opposed to each other. One group models itself on Muhammad’s fanatics, the other on all-powerful caliphs. It’s what Ayn Rand called the conflict between the Witch Doctor and Attila — one believing only in brute force, the other in the unquestionable commands of supernatural powers.

- Daniel Masliyah: Examining how blogs represent a revolution in journalism through a primary case study within the Iranian Blogging Revolution

Although blogging can be described as one of the most transformative media technology since the invention of the printing press, there are still a lot of dangers that exist within its usage. For example, a court in Alexandria, Egypt came to the decision of a four-year prison term to blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil. Native to Egypt, Nabil who is twenty-two years of age was indicted on grounds that his Web postings insulted Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. As an outspoken secularist, Nabil criticized Islam-inspired violence called Mubarak a “symbol of tyranny,” and branded Egypt’s Al-Azhar University as “the university of terrorism.”

Remember this the next time the Egyptian Embassy in Washington claims that, “[Kareem’s] sentence was the result of an impartial judicial process with due process, including the right of appeal”: Prosecutors obstruct appeal of blogger Karim Amer’s conviction.

(HRinfo/IFEX) – HRinfo is asking the prosecutor-general to order members of the prosecution in East Alexandria Integral Court to stop hindering the procedure to appeal the conviction of Egyptian blogger Karim Amer.

HRinfo’s lawyer, Rawda Ahmed, who is part of the defense team, has travelled to Alexandria many times to file the appeal. However, upon discovery that the appeal related to Amer’s case, the prosecution refused to process it.

Rawda has clashed over this matter with members of the prosecution, who stonewalled and criticized her for defending Amer.

In response, Rawda has urged the prosecutor-general to order members of the prosecution immediately to stop hindering the appeal procedures in Amer’s case. As a prisoner, Amer has the right to the full defense guaranteed by the law. The prosecutors also must ignore any personal opinions that might motivate them to hinder the prisoners’ legally guaranteed right to appeal.

From Reporters Without Borders:

Call to French president to lobby President Mubarak about press freedom

Reporters Without Borders called today on French President Jacques Chirac to urge his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, to expand press freedom and release from prison blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman (“Kareem Ameer”) and journalist Abd al-Munim Gamal al-Din Abd al-Munim when Mubarak visits France on 15 April.

“Egypt throws journalists and cyber-dissidents in jail and censors what they write to stifle the media and online activity,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said. “Egypt is one of France’s main economic partners in the region, but this partnership must include discussion about democratic reforms, which are not being made through lack of political will.

“Mubarak’s government continually abuses press freedom by silencing independent voices,“ it said. “The president refuses to reform the press law and give more guarantees to media workers, whose job is made dangerous by the existence of 35 offences for which they can be sent to prison, including up to five years for ‘false news,’ defaming the president or foreign heads of state and ‘undermining national institutions’ such as parliament and the army.

Kareem Amer was arrested on 6 November last year after posting articles on his blog www.karam903.blogspot.com denouncing government abuses and criticising the country’s religious institutions, especially the Sunni Al-Azhar University, where he studied law. He was sentenced on 22 February this year to three years in prison for “incitement to hatred of Islam” and one year for “insulting” Mubarak.

Reporters Without Borders is also very concerned about Abd al-Munim Gamal al-Din Abd al-Munim, of the twice-weekly Islamist paper Al-Shaab, organ of the Labour Party (Hizb al-Amal), who was arrested by state security (SSI) agents at his home in 1993. He was tried that year in the prosecution of the Islamist group Talia al Fatah and in February 1999 in a case about people expelled from Albania, but was cleared in both. However, the authorities refuse to give any information about him.