Published on 24 August 2009
26 October 2009 - King Abdallah pardons woman journalist sentenced to 60 lashes
11 August 2009 - Authorities close Lebanese satellite TV station’s bureaux over sex talk
6 May 2009 - Government pressure on TV programme considered too liberal
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5 February 2010 - Court imposes new two-year sentence on website editor
Reporters Without Borders is disturbed to learn that access to the Twitter pages of two Saudi human rights activists, Walid Abdelkhair and Khaled al-Nasser, has been blocked since last week, apparently because of the human rights content they had been posting on the micro-blogging webservice.
“We condemn the blocking of these cyber-dissidents’ Twitter pages and we call for their immediate restoration,” Reporters Without Borders said. “This situation is very worrying and is symptomatic of a growing crackdown on Saudi Internet users.”
Nasser and Abdelkhair said their Twitter pages had been blocked by the Saudi government’s Communications and Information Technology Commission. Nasser, who keeps a blog called Mashi Sah (“That’s not true”) said his Twitter messages included references to the human rights situation and governance in Saudi Arabia and links to human rights sites.
Abdelkhair, a human rights lawyer and head of a Saudi human rights organisation, had also referred to human rights violations in his “tweets,” the short text messages that are Twitter’s speciality.
Ahmed Al-Omran, a blogger who first drew attention to the situation, said it was the first time the authorities had moved against Twitter users in Saudi Arabia.
Press freedom continues to be virtually non-existent in Saudi Arabia. Culture and information ministry spokesman Abdul Rahman Al-Hazaa announced the closure of the Riyadh and Jeddah bureaux of the Lebanon-based satellite TV station LBC on 9 August for broadcasting a programme in which a Saudi man talked about his sexual adventures.
Saudi Arabia was ranked 161st out of 173 countries in the 2008 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
Adel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, better known by the pen name Kareem Amer, was arrested on 6 November 2006, for articles published on his blog .
