A Lebanese citizen was arrested for allegedly insulting the country’s president, Michel Sleiman, on Facebook. Telegraph, Wednesday (28/7/2010), report, Ahmad Shuman was arrested soon after he arrived at Beirut international airport on a flight from Kiev.
According to prosecutors, Shuman has been doing “defamation, slander, and humiliation” when he and three friends created a page on the social networking site whose contents criticized President Sleiman. Although widely regarded as the most democratic Arab country, Lebanon has laws that strictly punish those who insulted the president. That position is seen as the embodiment of the Republic of Lebanon, although the position of prime minister, currently held by Saad Hariri, is considered more power.
The four men had created a page on Facebook, entitled “We do not want a hypocrite as president.” This page has been removed, but a cached version of it includes a long essay criticizing the performance of Sleiman as supreme commander of the armed forces.
Version hidden Sleiman attacking political position is unclear. Four of them considered that the President has tried to become pro-American and pro-Syria at the same time, and that he had rejected peace with Israel, but also supports negotiations with the Jewish state.
They call Sleiman as “a failure of the worst” and wrote disparaging comments on the website. “You are like a snake; everything you do from under the table,” sounds a comment on the website. There are also claims about the sectarianism which is considered seriously by the prosecutors in the country that still shadowed by civil war eclipsed those years.
Shuman friends, namely Naim Hanna, Antoine Ramia, and Shebel Qasab, all in their 20s, have been arrested and charged with similar offenses last month.
Lebanon’s Justice Department has defended himself from accusations overreacted by saying, “Freedom of the media in Lebanon and other civilized nations reached its limits when the content is pure slander and aims to destroy the head of state.”
That’s for the first time in Lebanon, such accusations brought against individuals associated comments they make on the internet. The fact that has drawn criticism from human rights groups. “The allegations damage the reputation of Lebanon as the country with the greatest tolerance for freedom of expression in the Arab world,” said Nadim Khoury, Director of Human Rights Watch to Beirut, quoted by The Daily Star, Lebanon’s leading newspaper.
“Using criminal laws to censor the people of Lebanon is a shameful step in the wrong direction from the government.”
President Sleiman remained silent on the issue, but a message posted on his Facebook page to justify the arrest. The message says, the four men had crossed the line.
The four men will crouch two years in prison if convicted.
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