After 21 months in prison, Egyptian blogger Hani Nazeer was freed last week.   Prior to his arrest, Nazeer ran a Christian blog under the name, “Karez el-Hobb.”  He had posted a criticism of the book “Teiss Azazil fi Makka”  or “The Bull of Azazi in Mecca.”  He also discussed human rights violations in Egypt.  For these “crimes,” he was arrested and not heard...

"Down with Husni Mubarak," "Down with Emergency law" are among the chants echoing throughout Egyptian cities today.  As part of the "Revolution of Silence," hundreds of Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest police brutality.  Khaled Said, an Egyptian citizen, was killed on June 6th by security forces who beat him to death for asking why he...

Blogger Salim Naser Al Roqai recently spoke out against the hiring of large numbers of unemployed by the security apparatus in Libya. “The current trend is to hire all the unemployed to the state police and security agencies, to the point where there will be ten security agents assigned to each Libyan!” Al Roqai said. “It sounds like the doors for decent work have been closed and there...

On April 26, Samer Abu Libdeh, a Jordanian policy analyst and board member of CyberDissidents.org, wrote an article critical of autocracy and sectarianism in Jordan.  He pointed to King Abdullah’s policies which “exacerbated ethnic tension within the kingdom, and the adoption of a policy of apartheid, clearly demonstrated by the withdrawal of the Jordanian citizenship of more than 2,700...

After thirty three months in the Abu Zabaal prison on the outskirts of Cairo, Egyptian blogger Musaad Abu Fagr has finally been released.  Despite court orders for his release since February 2008, the Interior Ministry detained him until July 14th, 2010 under Egypt’s draconian emergency laws.    Musaad Abu Fagr is a novalist, cinematographer and a blogger.  Hailing from a...