DAMASCUS, June 10, 2008 (MENASSAT) – The Higher Court for the Internal Security (an exceptional non-constitutional court) on June 8 adjourned the trial of Syrian blogger Karim Arbaji who was arrested on June 7, 2007.
Arbaji is a trade councilor and the administrator of the online forum akhawia.net (brotherhood). Amnesty International has declared that is an opinion prisoner, held for peacefully expressing his political views. Arbaji had previously been summoned many times before the military intelligence in Damascus because of his connections to the forum. On April 20, he appeared before the court on the accusation of "spreading lies to weaken the nationalist feeling" according to article 286.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights asked the Syrian authorities to immediately release Arbaji without conditions, in addition to the members of Damascus Declaration and all other opinion prisoners in the Syrian prisons, and to end the arbitrary arrest and the interference in the judicial system by the intelligence services. The Observatory also demanded to abolish the Court for the Internal Security whose decisions cannot be appealed.
The Syrian authorities had previously sentenced seven young men to five and seven years of prison for publishing material on the forum: Tareq al-Ghourani, Maher Ibrahim Asbar, Houssam Milhem, Omar Abdallah, Diab Sariya, Ayham Saker and Alam Fakhour. In May, another blogger, Tariq Biasi, who has been held since July 2007, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges similar to those leveled against Arbaji.
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