PEN International

Ahead of a court of appeal hearing on 28 May, IFEX-TMG urges judiciary to quash the seven-year prison terms handed down to Ghazi Ben Mohamed Beji and Jaber Ben Abdallah Majri for online publishing.

UPDATE: The president of IFEX member Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), Nabeel Rajab, was re-arrested and sentenced to three years in prison on 16 August. Many other human rights defenders remain in prison, including BCHR’s founder Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, and his daughter, Zainab Al-Khawaja.

Salama Kila was arrested on 23 April 2012 for his writings about the recent events taking place in the country, and is considered to be at serious risk of torture and ill-treatment.

The anthology, part of IFEX-TMG’s ongoing project, brings together journalistic articles, commentaries, prose and verse in Arabic written both during the Ben Ali regime and since its fall, and is illustrated with images of the revolution.

These rights are persistently denied by repressive regimes often in collusion, implicit or otherwise, with powerful non-state players.

An appeals court ordered a retrial in the case of all twenty-one opposition activists, writers and bloggers convicted by a special security court on 22 June 2011, including Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace and Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, but ruled that they should remain in jail pending a new verdict.

Twenty-seven IFEX members appeal for end to impunity in recent brutal attacks on journalists in Kazakhstan, including near-fatal attack on Luqpan Akhmedyarov in April.

The literary translator has been held without charge since 10 January 2012, and is said to be in a fragile condition after having started a hunger strike on 2 April.