Defending your rights in the digital world
eff.org | Feb 11th 2012Hamza Kashgari is under threat. The blogger and journalist fled to Malaysia from Saudi Arabia on February 8 after tweets he wrote about the Prophet Mohammed provoked clerics to demand he be tried for apostasy and members of the public to call for his murder. After arriving in Malaysia on his way to a third country, however, he was arrested by security officials at Kuala Lumpur airport, according to a report from Human Rights Watch. Kashgari is currently under threat of extradition to Saudi Arabia. The Guardian has reported Malaysian sources as stating that the request for extradition came from Interpol, a charge that Interpol denies.
Ethiopian blogger smacked with life sentence
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Ethiopian blogger Elias Kifle was handed a life sentence in absentia this week for his coverage of banned opposition groups. Kifle, who lives in the United States, is editor of the Washington-based opposition website Ethiopian Review and was previously handed a life sentence, in 2007, on charges of treason. Kifle was sentenced along with columnist Reeyot Alemu and editor Woubshet Taye, both of whom live and work in Ethiopia and received 14-year prison sentences.
EFF condemns the decision by the Addis Ababa court and echoes CPJ's call to the Supreme Court to reverse the convictions.
Tunisian fight for Internet freedom continues
Chinese netizen slapped with ten year sentence
China's repression of online dissent is no secret. The country leads the way in both sophistication and extent of its online censorship, and tops the list of countries that jail bloggers by a landslide. In 2012, it would seem things are only getting worse.
When Hosni Mubarak was ousted from the Egyptian presidency in February, Egypt's revolutionaries saw a new beginning: an Egypt in which individual rights--including the right to free expression--would be respected. Just nine months later, with several prominent bloggers languishing in prison and countless other civilians tried by military courts for protesting, the future looks bleak.
In terms of numbers, Egypt ranks third--behind only China and Iran--for threatened and jailed bloggers. Throughout the past decade numerous well-known bloggers were imprisoned, sometimes without trial, and in many cases subjected to torture, for the crime of speaking out. Despite hopes that Mubarak's ouster would put a stop to restrictions on free expression, under military rule, the crackdown continues.
Today, EFF joined nine human rights and digital freedom organizations from around the world in sending a letter to the government of Vietnam calling for the release of blogger and human rights defender Pham Minh Hoang.
Readers may remember Pham Minh Hoang from a blog post we wrote in August. Mr. Hoang is a university professor with dual French and Vietnamese citizenship who has been sentenced to three years in prison and an additional three years under house arrest, for trying to "overthrow the government." His crime was exercising a right held dear by much of the world: using the Internet to speak out. EFF, the Committee to Protect Journalists, ARTICLE 19, Reporters without Borders, and the other rights organizations are calling for the Vietnamese government to recognize Mr. Hoang's rights to free expression and release him.
This week's news roundup takes us to Iran, where censorship is getting worse, Turkey, where it might be getting better, and Zimbabwe, where a blogger is under threat.
Iran sets out to build ‘national Internet’
Iran already ranks amongst the world’s worst when it comes to online censorship. The country's censors target a variety of content, including political opposition, human rights and news sites, and a range of 'offensive' sites.
Pakistan
In Pakistan, where substantial online and offline censorship already exist, reports have emerged that users of the ISP Mobilink must add proxy 10.215.2.32 port 3128 to browse the Internet, resulting in censorship of key words and phrases in search engines, as well as several individual web pages, mostly related to Balochistan.
According to Shahzad Ahmad at the OpenNet Initiative, “Mobilink’s new filtering system will directly affect a large portion of Pakistan’s online community, which comprises 17 percent of the country’s population, or around 28 million people.”
Ahmad also notes that there is “no public knowledge of new legislation” that would have caused Mobilink to implement the new filtering.
Original Page: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/bloggers-under-fire
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