Petition to be launched over Saudi blogger arrest

Reporters without Borders plans to launch a petition this week calling for the release Saudi blogger Ahmad Fouad Al-Farhan, the press freedom advocate group told ArabianBusiness.com on Sunday.

Clothilde Le Coz, head of the internet freedom desk at Reporters without Borders, said the group also planned to write to the minister of interior over Al-Farhans's imprisonment.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested the popular 32-year-old blogger on December 10 for violating “non-security regulations", but his detention was not made public until last Tuesday.

Al-Farhan’s blog - Searching for freedom, dignity, justice, equality, shoura and all the rest of lost Islamic values - has posted a letter, allegedly from Al-Farhan, which states he believes he was arrested because he “wrote about political prisoners in Saudi Arabia”.

Reporters without Borders has condemned Al-Farhan detention, which is believed to be the first arrest of an online critic in the kingdom.

"The reforms and the opening announced by King Abdallah Ibn Al-Saud have yet to have any impact on the lives of Saudis, including those who openly express their disagreement with government policies,” the group said in a statement last week.

"After blocking the news website Elaph and the leading blog publishing service www.blogger.com, the authorities have now directly targeted a blogger for the first time.”

Saudi Arabia is on the Reporters without Borders list of '13 internet enemies' and was ranked 148th out of 169 countries in the Reporters without Borders world press freedom index that was published in October 2007.

The Saudi government’s official internet blacklist is believed to affect more than 400,000 websites, ranging from the sites of political organisations to those of unrecognised Islamist movements and pornography sites.

According to Reporters without Borders, Saudi Arabia does not hide its online censorship.

“Censorship concentrates on pornographic content, but it also targets opposition websites, Israeli publications, or sites dealing with homosexuality. Blogs also pose a problem to the Saudi censors. Last year they tried to completely block access to the country’s biggest blog tool, blogger.com. But now they just block the blogs that are deemed unacceptable,” the group said on its website.

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