The Blog — Alert

Imprisoned Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who herself frequently represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians, was granted a furlough for three days after spending the past 867 days in prison.

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Syrian blogger Razan Ghazzawi was arrested yesterday while trying to leave Syria via the Jordanian border. Razan was on her way to a conference in Amman about defending the freedom of the media in the Arab World when she was detained. Razan has a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Balamand in Lebanon, and she is the author of razanghazzawi.com where she defends freedom of expression. Additionally, she has been one of the few Arabic activists who advocates for the rights of homosexuals in the Arab World.

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Ethiopia where he faces imprisonment and "mistreatment" for the crime of using Skype (he has been in prison there before and says he fears for his life).

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"I have been locked up, again on a set of flimsy charges, five years after imprisonment for supporting the judiciary" says Alaa Abd El Fattah. The Guardian has published a letter Alaa snuck out of his prision cell to his pregnant wife and we've republished it here. 

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This weekend, Egyptian blogger, Twitter activist, and human rights advocate Alaa Abd El Fattah (@alaa) went in to a military court in Egypt for interrogation. He refused to answer the military’s questions and was thus detained for 15 days. Activists in MENA and all over the world are campaigning on and offline for his release. 

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Over the past few months we've been covering the Saudi #women2drive movement and this week we've shared some horrible news about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. People are asking us- "How can we help?" We believe getting the word out and making people aware that these human rights abuses are real and serious, is the first step to achieving change. Here's what you can do:

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Originally published on the DailyBeast by David Keyes, Executive Director of Advancing Human Rights and CyberDissidents.org, this piece explains that the rights of women in Saudi Arabia are still severely limited and to applaud King Abdullah for "human rights improvements" is a mistake.

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Two weeks into the #Tahrir square sit in, violence breaks out.

One of the arrested is Amr Gharbeia, an blogger and the technology and freedoms program officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

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Residents of Mumbai and their supporters all over the world are turning to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to share information about the #MumbaiBlasts: numbers for help lines, connecting families, information for contacting the police, and more. We've compiled some of the useful information here, please Tweet or Message us @aym if you have information you'd like us to add. 

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This week the Egyptian military sentenced a blogger to three years imprisonment for speaking poorly of it. As with human rights abuses before the January 25 Egyptian uprising (see our case study on the Free Kareem campaign), a network of online activists in various places has sprung to action in an effort to, first, make sure everyone knows about Maikel Nabil and, two, get him released.

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