irrepressible.info
Some of you may have noticed a shiny new green button on my livejournal. This button is a link to the Amnesty International campaign site, irrepressible.info. This campaign is dedicated to eliminating the censorship and repression of freedom of expression currently occurring in many countries around the world. There is a pledge you can sign to help pressure governments and the international community to halt the insidious undermining of freedom of speech.
This denial of basic human rights is being aided and abetted by major IT corporations such as Google, which blocks links to censored material in China, Iran and Africa, and Yahoo, which provided information to Chinese authorities which led to the arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao. On April 27, 2005, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years for sending an email containing information about a Communist Party decision to a website based in the USA. The Chinese authorities could not have discovered the identity of the account holder without the information provided by Yahoo. In Vietnam and Iran, several bloggers have been imprisoned for expressing viewpoints critical of their governments' policies.
Last month, the Egyptian courts sentenced `Abd al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, to four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam, defaming the president, and “spreading information disruptive of the public order.” According to reporters who attended the hearing, Judge Ayman al-Akazi issued the verdict in a brief five minute session.
Sulaiman, a 22-year-old former student of Islamic jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University, is better known by his pen name, Karim Amer. Following a complaint filed by the university, Sulaiman appeared before a public prosecutor on November 7 to answer charges related to items he wrote on his blog criticizing Islam, the authorities at Al-Azhar and President Hosni Mubarak. Prosecutors ordered him detained pending investigation and renewed his detention four times before his trial opened at Muharram Bek Court in Alexandria on January 25. (www.hrw.org).
Imagine being imprisoned for 10 years for posting something on myspace or livejournal or writing an email, something we all do without thinking about it. Help give people in repressed countries that same freedom that we take for granted. Go to irrepressible.info and sign the pledge. Repost this on your myspace or livejournal, copy and paste it in an email and forward it to your friends. Some people don't have that freedom. Some people couldn't send this message. You can.
This denial of basic human rights is being aided and abetted by major IT corporations such as Google, which blocks links to censored material in China, Iran and Africa, and Yahoo, which provided information to Chinese authorities which led to the arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao. On April 27, 2005, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years for sending an email containing information about a Communist Party decision to a website based in the USA. The Chinese authorities could not have discovered the identity of the account holder without the information provided by Yahoo. In Vietnam and Iran, several bloggers have been imprisoned for expressing viewpoints critical of their governments' policies.
Last month, the Egyptian courts sentenced `Abd al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, to four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam, defaming the president, and “spreading information disruptive of the public order.” According to reporters who attended the hearing, Judge Ayman al-Akazi issued the verdict in a brief five minute session.
Sulaiman, a 22-year-old former student of Islamic jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University, is better known by his pen name, Karim Amer. Following a complaint filed by the university, Sulaiman appeared before a public prosecutor on November 7 to answer charges related to items he wrote on his blog criticizing Islam, the authorities at Al-Azhar and President Hosni Mubarak. Prosecutors ordered him detained pending investigation and renewed his detention four times before his trial opened at Muharram Bek Court in Alexandria on January 25. (www.hrw.org).
Imagine being imprisoned for 10 years for posting something on myspace or livejournal or writing an email, something we all do without thinking about it. Help give people in repressed countries that same freedom that we take for granted. Go to irrepressible.info and sign the pledge. Repost this on your myspace or livejournal, copy and paste it in an email and forward it to your friends. Some people don't have that freedom. Some people couldn't send this message. You can.