(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned a “mockery of a trial” in which lawyer Mohammed Abbu was found guilty of posting “false news” on the Internet. The organisation urged democratic countries to boycott the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis unless the government ends its Internet crackdown and releases Abbu. On […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned a “mockery of a trial” in which lawyer Mohammed Abbu was found guilty of posting “false news” on the Internet. The organisation urged democratic countries to boycott the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis unless the government ends its Internet crackdown and releases Abbu.
On the night of 29 April, Abbu was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, “at the end of a trial that trampled on the most elementary rules of law,” RSF said.
“The charges against him were baseless. He was punished for having used the Internet to criticise government corruption. In a cruel irony, he will be in prison when the WSIS – a conference on the circulation of news and information on the Net – opens in Tunis in November,” the organisation noted.
Abbu was arrested on 1 March. He was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly physically attacking a colleague at a 2002 conference. The lawyer was given another 18 months for posting an article on the Tunisnews website in August 2004 in which he compared torture in Tunisia to American soldiers’ abuses of prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
Many trial observers said they believed Abbu’s conviction was in fact connected with another article posted on the Internet shortly before his arrest, in which he criticised Tunisia’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to attend the WSIS and, using irony, exposed corruption among the Tunisian president’s family. One of Abbu’s lawyers described him as the “personal hostage of [Tunisian President] Ben Ali.”
Abbu’s lawyers refused to enter a plea on the assault charge, of which they were notified only days before the trial was set to get underway. Lawyer and human rights activist Radhia Nasrawi said, “There was no concrete evidence to back up the charge, apart from an unsigned medical certificate, which has no legal standing. A number of witnesses would have been able to testify that no assault took place at the 2002 conference.”
