It’s bad enough that Egypt has insisted on keeping him imprisoned for the “crime” of practicing free speech on the internet, but the harsh treatment is unacceptable and will surely create further international outrage at the real crime, which is imprisoning and torturing an innocent blogger, a crime that the Egyptian government has refused to correct while toying with a young man’s life.

A lot of people already know about Kareem, but most people don’t. We need to continue spreading the word in order to keep the pressure on the Egyptian government. Please fight the grave injustice of Kareem’s imprisonment by downloading this plugin and placing it on your sidebar.

There are 131 blogs around the world currently using this. Please help us get this up to at least 300!

In 2007, Egyptian writer Kareem Amer was imprisoned for “insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak” on his blog. He is currently serving a four-year sentence at Borg Al-Arab prison outside Alexandria.

Read full article here.

On Wednesday, March 18, Omid Reza Mirsayafi became the first blogger to die at the hands of a prison authority. In the wake of Omid’s passing we read with interest a great deal of coverage of the circumstances surrounding his death. One in particular, an essay of remembrance by someone who knew him, was of particular note. However, one statement in the piece brought us up short.

Omid had asked the author to help attract attention to his case. The author consulted with friends who had, she said, more experience with such situations. Those friends counseled against attracting attention to Omid, advising that it would hurt him in the end. The author took that advice.

Anyone who has taken part in free speech activities on behalf of the imprisoned sooner or later, usually sooner, is given just this sort of counsel. Without fail, it comes from those inside larger human rights or governmental organizations and it is hard not to take seriously. After all, these organizations have money, expertise and case officers. Surely they must be correct. We have to confess, however, that when we were first given this counsel, it rubbed us the wrong way, so we spoke with a number of people we knew who had been inside the interrogation rooms and jail cells, people who had previous been where Omid was. And to a person, they said: The more attention, the more coverage, the more pressure, the better.

We subsequently launched Free Mojtaba and Arash Day, the first time the blogosphere had been used to raise awareness of unjust imprisonment of bloggers on a global level. It led to an enormous uptick in awareness of the issue in general and of these two Iranian bloggers specifically. Free Mojtaba and Arash Day was in the top five “memes,” or online topics, that year.

Harassment is the ground state of these places, these interrogation rooms, prison cells and torture chambers, not a result of attention. In fact, that is exactly what the villains who perpetrate these obscenities want you to think.

At the Committee to Protect Bloggers, we have occasionally been contacted by people who knew they were going to have to go in for interrogation and possible arrest. One of them was the Syrian poet and novelist, Ammar Abdulhamid, who has since left Syria to take up a position in Washington, D.C. as a non-resident fellow at the Saban Institute of the Brookings Institution.

“In times of trouble, activists and their families are often told to shy away from publicizing their ordeal,” said Abdulhamid. “They are advised that this is indeed the best way to make it short and to navigate back to safety. In my case, however, international attention eased my way to freedom. Without it, I might not even be alive today. Still, there are no hard-fast rules here, and the best thing that international supporters and sympathizers can do is to follow the wishes of the (effected person), when they can be reached, or the wishes of their family members and/or friends.“

At Free Kareem we have focused on one man as an example of all, Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, also known as Kareem Amer, who, two years ago, was sentenced to four years in prison for critical writing that he posted on his blog.

Kareem Amer occasionally writes letters to a fellow blogger and good friend of ours, noting that the international support is one of the few things that kept him hopeful and sane in these tough times. Every time we received bad news about his case, we rallied hard and we were loud in the media. Shortly after each rally or letter campaign we receive positive remarks about Kareem’s situation, specifically after he has been tortured. So how can we assume that it doesn’t make a difference or that such efforts create a negative one?

We are not claiming that we’re responsible for all positive events that have occurred for Kareem, but we do not want to know where Kareem would be if it were not for the recognition and worldwide support that this campaign helped give him. We are very consistent with our efforts for Kareem and for this reason we know that the Egyptian government is threatened by it, as they have implied many times. We work hard because it apparently makes a great difference for our friend. Many people have asked us to stop. We never did, and Kareem himself wrote to us expressing his gratitude for that. Nothing else is more encouraging and reassuring than his own words asking us to continue for his sake and those like him.

Getting light and attention focused on persecuted bloggers is not like building a grand piano. It’s a simple, if demanding, task. Those who who tell us we must not agitate or the men and women we are trying to protect will be hurt wind up as accidental advocates for the torturers. All that matters is that we listen only to our brothers and sisters inside. If they, or their families, say we need to ease up, then we do. But that has happened to the two of us a collective grand total of one time.

Torturers torture because they love torturing. They do not do it for a reason. And they are far more likely to be stopped by their masters when their masters are in the cross-hairs than when they are left to operate in the dark.

We appreciate everyone’s support, and thank them for coming to see the presentation and learning how they can help support the campaign.

Photo source.

From Amnesty:

Experts of the Human Rights Council have concluded that the Egyptian authorities have detained blogger Karim Amer arbitrarily for his online criticisms and for exercising his right to freedom of expression. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) communicated its decision to Amnesty International.

[...]

Karim Amer was sentence in 2007 to four years in prison for writing on his blog criticizing Egypt’s al-Azhar religious authorities and President Mubarak. Charges against him include “spreading information disruptive of public order and damaging to the country’s reputation”, “incitement to hate Islam” and “defaming the President of the Republic”.

Read full release.

This is the video we created two years ago opposing Egypt’s inclusion in the Human Rights Council:

Now we finally have support in this with a service called Tweetizen, which allows you to create Twitter groups and will soon enable an embedding feature where you can embed it on the site, either as a widget or a page, which is great!

We have jumped at this early opportunity and created a group on Tweetizen where you can keep up with what people are saying about Kareem or the Free Kareem Campaign.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

If you use Twitter, we hope that you will follow us @freekareem, and help by retweeting (RT) some of our posts.

Dear Mr. President,

The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to protest the relentless campaign of persecution against Internet journalists and bloggers by Egypt’s various security services. Regrettably, the routine harassment and detention of bloggers, according to CPJ research, is only one element of an overall decline in press freedom in Egypt in recent years. In 2007, CPJ concluded that Egypt was among the 10 worst backsliders in terms of press freedom worldwide, due to a massive number of legal proceedings being launched against critical journalists. Since then, this trend has continued unabated with hundreds of lawsuits, criminal complaints, and summonses being issued against editors, reporters, bloggers, and free expression advocates.

[...]

CPJ research also shows that at least three bloggers remain in administrative detention, held without charge under the Emergency Law, or are serving prison sentences.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, widely known as Karim Amer, was arrested in November 2006 for writing critical articles about prominent religious figures and the president of the republic. He was convicted in February 2007 of insulting religion and the president, and is currently serving a four-year jail term for both charges. He is the only Egyptian blogger to ever be convicted for his online writings. Since then Amer has been mistreated in prison. In November 2007 he was severely beaten by another prisoner and a guard, according to his lawyer and to multiple local human rights groups. He was prevented from documenting his injuries in a medical report, local human rights organizations widely reported. In August 2008, he was prevented from leaving his cell and exercising in a courtyard like other prisoners. Around the same time, some of Amer’s books and other reading materials were arbitrarily confiscated. Lawyers at ANHRI told CPJ that they filed an appeal as soon as Amer was convicted, but that the authorities have failed to consider it two years into his four-year prison term. Legal experts in Egypt told CPJ that such appeals are usually processed within six months.

Read the full letter here.