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CAIRO: Two organizations are calling on the Minister of Justice Mamdouh Marei to arbitrate in the case of Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman Amer, the blogger who has been under arrest since November on charges of defaming the president.
Reporters Without Borders and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information wrote to the justice minister urging him “follow to this case closely and ensure that this young blogger is released soon”.
Amer’s court case at the Moharram Beik Court in Alexandria was adjourned on Jan. 17 and postponed to Jan. 25 after persistent please from defense attorneys.
The blogger has been in jail since Nov. 6 and faces up to nine years for posting articles critical of Islam on his blog (www.karam903.blogspot.com).
A former student of Al-Azhar University, Amer, 22 is currently detained in Al-Hadra prison in Alexandria for "spreading data and malicious rumors that disrupt public security"; "defaming the president of Egypt"; "incitement to overthrow the regime upon hatred and contempt"; and "incitement to hate 'Islam'.
Accused of railing against Islam, he was expelled from the University in March 2006 and reportedly questioned by Al-Azhar professors before he was arrested by state authorities.
Reporters Without Borders also called on Egyptian authorities to respect the International Covenant for Civil and Political Right.
“… Article 151 of the Egyptian Constitution stipulates that any agreement signed and ratified by Egypt becomes part of domestic law and applied like any other legislation. Egypt signed the International Covenant for Civil and Political Right, in which articles 18 and 19 clearly stipulate everyone’s right to freedom of expression, opinion, thought, conscience and religion. Subsequently, no one should ever be imprisoned for a press offence or for the views they express."
The letter added: "We would also like to draw your attention to the harsh conditions in which this young blogger is being held and the worrying state of his health. He has been in solitary confinement for more than two months. This has left him very weak and has affected him psychologically."
"Amer is targeted simply because he expressed his own views," Executive Director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Gamal Eid, said.
“We call upon advocates of freedom of expression in Egypt and all over the globe to support Kareem Amer in his prospected trial based on biased investigations by the Public Prosecutor,” Gamal Eid said.
The defense is reportedly planning to hold a demonstration in Amer’s support in the next court session on Jan. 25.
"Freedom of expression is a basic human right. We believe that Kareem Amer has the absolute right to express his personal views. This case is a clear violation of universal human rights principles," Amer's lawyer Rawda Ahmed, said in a previous interview.
The Daily Star Egypt had previously attempted to contact the Ministry of Interior concerning Amer’s status. Several faxes of queries have not been answered and a ministry official who answered a request for a phone interview declined to comment.
On Monday, The Daily Star Egypt again attempted to reach the Ministry for official comment on the Amer’s case as well as other pending queries involving arrests and alleged torture.
At press time, the Ministry of Interior had not returned calls.
Meanwhile, Amer’s case is beginning to garner international attention. A rally was held on Jan. 12 in front of the Egyptian embassy in Washington DC to call for his release.
Organized by a group called the DC Coalition for Blog Freedom, the rally urged the Egyptian government release Alexandria native Amer and protects his right to free speech.
A statement by the group said “Because of the urgency of his plight, DC-area residents of diverse backgrounds are staging a peaceful rally in front of the Egyptian Embassy's cultural affairs branch in DuPont Circle to defend Amer's right to blog freely and to call for his immediate release from jail.”
Although the protestors presented a petition to an embassy official who came out to meet them, when The Daily Star Egypt contacted the Foreign Ministry there appeared to be no plans to take any further steps concerning the matter.
Nevertheless, the issue of blogger freedoms in Egypt and around the world is continuing to raise concern.
Facing a “deteriorating state of civil society in the Arab world” and a growing number of arrests of bloggers and intern activists, journalists and representatives from civil society organizations are now calling upon Arab governments to enact new regulations for online information exchange.
The proposed new regulations would criminalize email spying and sharing of information on Internet users between state security and telecommunications companies.
The suggested criteria were agreed upon at a high-level seminar titled “Internet Freedom in the Arab World” held in Cairo in late December.
Organized by local human rights organization The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, the seminar suggested providing special protection to Internet journalists, and limiting the control of the Supreme Press Council..
However, while the proposed regulations are “good ideas”, it is highly unlikely that Arab governments will agree to introduce new legislation on freedom of expression on the Internet, Naila Hamdy, Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at AUC told The Daily Star Egypt.
Hamdy also argued that bloggers and civil society activists often face intimidation and arrest for their online writing due to the fact that they are not protected by press laws.
This however, should not prevent the public and reporters from mainstream media from paying close attention to their writing.
“Bloggers and activists expressing their views on society and politics in online forums are not perceived as journalists which often results in them being discredited by the government and the public,” she says.
Yet she thinks that Internet activists introduce important social and political topics to the public debate — issues that prestigious newspapers would otherwise not report.
“Take the recent sexual harassment incident in Downtown Cairo during Eid, for example. If it wasn’t for the bloggers, this social illness might have never have found its place on the national agenda,” Hamdy says
The four-year jail sentence of student blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman for the crimes of “contempt for religion” and “insulting the president” has dealt a harsh blow to the Egyptian blogosphere and free speech in the Middle East in the Internet age.
The popular blogger known as Sandmonkey reports from Cairo on Abdel Kareem’s story and the grave consequences of his case.
Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman was sentenced to four years in prison yesterday in a Cairo court. He will sit in jail for three years for the crime of “contempt for religion” and one year for “insulting the president”.
For those of you who haven’t been following the case, welcome to the Middle East. They do indeed have crimes like that around here.
Almost as disturbing as the sentence was the public reaction. As the court hearing ended, the media moved to the street in front of the courthouse and started interviewing people about what they thought of the trial. With the exception of human rights activists and bloggers, the Egyptian public seemed satisfied with the verdict, if not disappointed it wasn’t longer.
Many people expressed the view that Abdel Kareem should be killed for what he wrote, and each of them shared their preferred way to kill him: stabbing, hanging, and of course, the classic beheading. One actually asked a lawyer if it was legal to now kill him, since this verdict clearly brands him as an apostate, and the Sharia punishment for an apostasy is death. People were talking about killing him in the most casual manner, as if he was no longer a human being to them.
The whole sad story began almost a year ago, when Abdel Kareem wrote a blog post describing the prestigious Islamic University of Al Azhar - where he was enrolled a student - as “the other face of Al Qaeda.”
When a copy of the post was forwarded to the Al Azhar administrators, they were, naturally, not amused, and a disciplinary hearing was set up.
During that hearing, they confronted Kareem with what he wrote about the university and about Islam in general (he had, among other posts, written one comparing The Prophet Mohammed and Ariel Sharon, and favoring Ariel Sharon as the better human being) He admitted to his writing unapologetically, and started to accuse them of suppressing his freedom of speech and conducting a Middle Age-style inquisition against him. That same day Kareem was expelled from Al Azhar University.
A few days later, a university official went to the police and filed a police report accusing Abdel Kareem of insulting Islam and general contempt for religion.
The authorities, seeing that the report was filed by Al Azhar University, took it seriously and called Abdel Kareem in for questioning. Contrary to his lawyers’ advice, he refused to remain silent and proceeded to fight with and insult the prosecutor. The prosecutor decided to punish him by holding him for two weeks, “pending investigation.”
When Abdel Kareem faced the state prosecutor again two weeks later, it was too late. They were all, by then fully aware his writings and grossly offended, which helped add a personal touch to Abdel Kareem’s punishment from then on. He was refused the right to be released on bail, and finally was formally charged with his now three infamous charges: 1) disdain for religion, 2) insulting the President, 3) inciting sectarian strife and harming the stability of the country. All of these charges are very hard to define or defend against.
For the three months between his initial incarceration and trial, Abdel Kareem was held in solitary confinement, for fear his fellow inmates would find out why he was in jail and try to score extra points with God by harming him. The judge refused all of the requests from the defense to ease his conditions, causing Abdel Kareem’s lawyers to withdraw in protest.
Then, when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, his Islamist father publicly announced that he intended to attend the sentencing in order to disown him in public, and demanded Sharia law be applied his son.
The day of the verdict promised to be nothing short of a circus, and it didn’t disappoint.
In front of the courtroom during his trial, scores of journalists gathered with their cameras, recorders and notepads. There was a buzz in the air, speculations about the sentencing, chatter over the meaning of the case, and the random conversation with curious by-standers who wanted to know what the big deal was, and who that very important Abdel Kareem person is. On sentencing day, the judge declared that he would announce his verdict at the end of the day, and wouldn’t allow cameras and journalists inside the courtroom prior to that. It seemed that the press was going to spend a few hours outside doing nothing.
But then a surprise — out of nowhere, a big surprise from an unrelated case. Abu Omar -the famous Egyptian imam who was allegedly kidnapped from Milan by the CIA and was transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured for 3 years straight- showed up and started an impromptu press conference, violating the conditions of his release. He told the reporters that he was not permitted to talk to the media and is constantly under watch, so when he heard about the trial he figured that it would have lots of reporters present and decided to show up. He showed reporters his torture scars and told them that he wants to get back to Italy and asked the Italian government to help him. After that, he immediately left the building.
Shortly after, the Abdel Kareem sentence was announced: four years in prison.
The consequences of the verdict and sentence are grave, both for Abdel Kareem and the for the Egyptian blogosphere in general.
If Abdel Kareem’s appeals are unsuccessful, he will have to spend the next four years in prison, where he could very likely get killed by an over-enthusiastic believer. His other option is to spend the next four years in solitary confinement, which won’t probably bode well for his mental health. Dead or crazy, those are his options now.
As far as the blogosphere, the implications are equally dangerous. This verdict sets a legal precedent for prosecuting someone for what they write on the Internet, on charges that are not easily defined or defended against. This could be used to prosecute any blogger the government feels like punishing, and serves a huge blow to freedom of speech in Egypt.
In the last years, the country’s blogosphere has been shedding light on the victims of police torture by showing videos of their mistreatment and identifying the police officers who committed those acts, which has embarrassed the Ministry of Interior and the government greatly. This is the real reason why they are now prosecuting bloggers. They have made an example out of Abdel Kareem, who was neither influential nor famous before, punishing him with an unprecedented long sentence in order to send a message to the rest of the blogosphere: This could happen to you, so watch what you write.
It is too early to judge whether this intimidation tactic will make some Egyptian bloggers tone down their rhetoric. However the Egyptian bloggers, at least the ones that have talked about it, remain defiant for now and express their view that they won’t let the verdict scare them or soften their writing. Whether that fighting spirit will linger if the government intensifies its crackdown on bloggers remains to be seen.
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Threats unlikely to silence bloggers as Egypt jails youth for “insults”
Thursday, 01 March 2007
By Mona Eltahawy
Abdel Kareem Nabil, the 22-year-old Egyptian blogger sentenced to three years in jail for insulting Islam and an additional year behind bars for insulting President Hosni Mubarak, was not born when that president came to power.
It is at once sadly pathetic and oddly gratifying that the regime of Mubarak – who has ruled Egypt for 25 years – felt it necessary to convict a young man “armed” only with a keyboard and access to the internet. Frightening as his conviction might be, surely it is a victory for the brigade of the young and determined who populate the Egyptian blogosphere and who like Nabil have known no other leader than Mubarak.
Bloggers in Egypt have for months now irritated Mubarak’s regime with the audacity of those who know they have not simply youth on their side but the ability to shame a regime that has plenty to hide. Some of those bloggers combine their online activism with good old fashioned street protests which last year got many of them thrown in jail for weeks on that chestnut of a charge – insulting the president. But that just boosted their legitimacy as the young ones who took on the aging ruler and made many of them household names in Egypt.
The Mubarak regime would love nothing more than to shut down all blogs and throw their writers in jail. But it knows those bloggers’ ability to galvanize headlines as well as public outrage. A reminder of just such an ability will occur on March 3 when two police officers who beat up and sodomized a bus driver at a police station are due to appear before a judge. Those officers were arrested late last year after an outcry over a video they had made of the torture appeared on blogs and websites. The blogs forced the issue into the headlines and the regime was forced to respond. Whether the officers will be convicted of anything remains to be seen.
But why has Mubarak’s regime slammed its wrath on Nabil in particular?
Islam.
Religion and the bogeymen
Nabil has been outspoken not only in his criticism of the regime but also about both Islam and al-Azhar, the bastion of Sunni Muslim thought. There is nothing that Nabil could have said about either Islam or Mubarak that should ever warrant such a trial, conviction or sentencing. But in Mubarak’s Egypt, the regime knew putting this young man on trial and accusing him of insulting Islam would earn it cheap public opinion points.
His ordeal bears the tedious hallmarks of a regime that has spent a quarter of a decade quashing vibrancy and vitality out of a country that has always prided itself in an abundance of both. Not only does it wield a sledgehammer to intimidate anyone who dares oppose
Mubarak’s rule, but it is a regime that has perversely co-opted Islam to such an extent that it has reduced the religion to a muscle flexing competition with the Muslim Brotherhood over just who is the most Muslim of them all.
One cannot forget that this time last year Egypt was spearheading the campaign of manufactured outrage against the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Now as then, flying the flag for Muslim anger and insult was the Egyptian regime’s lazy way of burnishing its Islamic credentials at a time when domestic Islamists in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood were stronger than they have been in years.
The ultimate irony of course is that the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest opposition bloc in Parliament precisely because that’s exactly what Mubarak wants. Although technically outlawed, the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to openly contest parliamentary elections at the end of 2005. Those elections turned violently wrong when the Brotherhood began to win a few too many seats for the Egyptian regime’s comfort. The 88 seats they managed to capture are the perfect bogeyman that the regime waves in the face of a compliantly fearful U.S. administration.
And it did not take long for Mubarak to return to business as usual with the Muslim Brotherhood, in other words: imprisoning large groups of them just to clarify that he wasn’t seriously reconsidering their role in Egyptian society.
This cynical use and abuse of religious credentials that Mubarak’s regime has spent 25 years perfecting has not only left Egyptians feeling stuck between a rock – Mubarak – and a hard place – the Muslim Brotherhood – but laid the groundwork for what can only be
described as religious hysteria. With almost daily appearances on Egyptian television by one religious scholar or another, a conservative state-sanctioned Islam has become the altar upon which the Mubarak regime has pushed Egyptians to worship. Is it any wonder Nabil’s own parents seem to have disowned him because of the State’s allegations that he had insulted Islam?
The majority of Egyptians did not bother to vote in the parliamentary elections the Brotherhood was allowed to contest – a clear sign that they reject the false choice that was given them between a dictator who uses religion to bolster his rule and an Islamist movement which uses politics to find a way to rule. But the damage was done long ago and now the mere suggestion that someone has dared to question what the State and its clerics tell us is Islam leads very easily to Nabil’s travails.
But when a regime’s religious camouflage is so obvious, it must expect to be held up to its own standards. If that same State is such an eager defender of Islam (and surely Islam, which has thrived for more than 1,400 years, doesn’t need defending) then let us count the ways it honours and abides by it.
What is it if not an insult to the social justice at the heart of Islam that systematic torture infects police stations and jails around Egypt? Surely it is an affront to that same Islam that while Mubarak, his family and their inner sanctum of cronies benefit from the meager growth in the Egyptian economy they so proudly point to, so many Egyptians cannot afford to buy meat or have to juggle two or three jobs to weave the most basic of lives.
What kind of Islam does the Mubarak regime defend when a bus driver can be dragged to a police station, sodomized with a stick as police officers capture the torture on mobile phone camera and then send it to the driver’s co-workers to make sure the humiliation and intimidation is recorded for posterity?
The emperor’s new clothes
Enter the bloggers. They make those connections and they text message, they blog and they post on YouTube that the emperor is naked. They also out maneuver that same naked emperor and his henchmen by manipulating and subverting a technology that is daily leveling the playing field of information.
Nabil’s conviction might be a tired regime’s warning to the bloggers that jail always awaits them, but it is highly unlikely they will be cowed.
Alaa Abdel Fattah, who runs Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket with his wife and activist Manal Bahey El Deen, was one of the blogger activists who spent 40 days in jail last year. When I met him in Cairo in November he told me that before his detention he always wondered what jail would be like and now he knows. So that’s a bogeyman deflated, in other words. He still blogs. He’s still outspoken. After Nabil’s conviction Alaa summed up the farce of it all by telling the Associated Press:
"We (the Egyptian people) are enduring oppression, poverty and torture, so the least we can do is insult the president.”
Mubarak does not own Egypt and he does not own Islam. The bloggers will continue to remind him. And they cannot be silenced. Not just because they know how to hopscotch over blocked IP addresses but because it is impossible to silence youth. They will always find a way to have the last word.
In order not to put its credibility as an international player at risk, the European Union must demonstrate a consistent commitment to human rights in its relations to Egypt, says Isabel Schäfer
The sentencing of 22-year-old blogger Karim Amer to four years in prison by a court in Alexandria on February 22, 2007 signifies a setback for freedom of opinion and the press in Egypt. The regime is obviously making an example of the defendant as a warning to the burgeoning blogger scene (approx. 3000).
Suspended from the venerable Al-Ahzar University for "blasphemy," the student is now accused of publishing texts on his website that were critical of the university, of President Hosni Mubarak and of Islam in general.
Karim Amer thus managed to violate several taboos at once. He primarily found fault with the teaching methods at Al-Ahzar University, as well as pointing out human rights violations and making a plea for secularism.
It's the economy, stupid – not human rights!
Amnesty International ranks Karim Amer as a non-violent political prisoner who has been convicted for peacefully expressing his opinion, and criticizes the Egyptian legislation for specifying prison sentences for acts that are nothing more than the peaceful practice of freedom of opinion, thought, conscience and religion. The organization points out that this does not correspond with international standards.
Is it an ironic twist of fate or a political signal that, almost concurrently with the blogger's conviction, the action plan for the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was accepted by Egypt and the EU on March 6, 2007? Negotiations on the plan were very prolonged. As was already the case with the association treaty for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), the Egyptian and European negotiators were unable to reach an agreement on the text passages dealing with human rights.
There is no direct connection between the two incidents, but the Egyptian regime is ultimately sending the message that they are willing to cooperate with the EU economically, but don't want it intervening in the country's human rights situation.
Thus, on the one hand, the long-term economic implications of the action plan are being underestimated, and on the other, the Egyptians are using the human rights problem to demonstrate their own position of power to the European mediators, while trying to legitimate their cooperation with the West to a people that holds increasingly anti-Western sentiments.
Money for nothing?
The action plan that has now been resolved defines the agenda for cooperation for the next three to five years, and is designed to support the Egyptian reform agenda. Eight sub-committees were established, including one on "Political Issues: Human Rights and Democracy." For the period from 2007 to 2010, 558 million euros have been budgeted for the action plan, and in 2010 an additional 250 to 300 million are to be invested.
Human rights organizations such as the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) have expressed disappointment over the action plan. The wording is so watered down, they maintain, that it seems more like a letter of intent than a joint working plan.
Nor were the recommendations of the human rights experts incorporated. Positive points are that the action plan once again calls on both parties to safeguard the independence of the judiciary; to improve conditions in the prisons; to foster freedom of opinion, assembly and association; and to fight against discrimination, racism and xenophobia.
Kant's theory of democratic peace
With the European Neighbourhood Policy it launched in 2004, the EU reformed its instruments and reinforced its push for democratization. The supreme long-term goal of the ENP is to build democracies in the countries bordering on the EU. The ENP is founded on Emmanuel Kant's theory of democratic peace, which assumes that democracies fight fewer wars amongst themselves and are more mindful of human rights.
A central program for promoting democracy and human rights is the European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). This program is to be financed from the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) in force from 2007 to 2013.
In order to foster democracy, human rights and good governance, the so-called "Governance Facility" was created – a special budget line designed to induce political reforms.
Positive conditionality
The EU Commission hopes that the new mechanisms will give it a more powerful form of positive conditionality. In concrete terms, this means promoting projects in the areas of good governance, democratic practices and values, the constitutional state, exchange and mobility between individuals and groups in the partner countries, and cultural and civil dialogue.
But some European diplomats are quite skeptical of whether it will be possible to find any acceptable democratization or human rights projects to support.
There continues to be very little willingness to institute reforms. The question of the conflicting goals of the EU remains unresolved: stability on the one hand, democratization and respect for human rights on the other. A connection between fulfilling the conditions set as contingent for any future prospects of joining the EU, as was the case in Eastern Europe, is missing here.
Conditions can only be imposed if a process of political reform is already underway and if both the government and public opinion are ready for it.
The necessity of a long-term perspective
But this does not mean that the EU should simply sit back and hope for better times. In order not to put its credibility as an international player at risk, the EU must demonstrate a consistent commitment to human rights. When political pressure must be exerted, however, as happens frequently, just the opposite can result, i.e. a worsening in the situation of the human rights advocates, who are then seen as allies of the West and must suffer even more repression. It all remains a political balancing act.
The goal of the EU can only be to assist with creating institutional and political conditions that enable social transformation to take place. It must always work with a long-term perspective in mind, stimulating reforms and implementing indirect policies. These are the only criteria by which it can be judged.
At the same time, the EU must be more alert and more demanding, in particular as regards adherence with signed agreements. It should also lobby for the release of the blogger Karim, because, regardless of what one may think of his texts, four years in prison for his "crime" and his age are simply unreasonable.
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