Mick Hartley

Sandmonkey on the four-year jail sentence handed down to student blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman for the crimes of “contempt for religion” and “insulting the president”:

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 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.