Free Alaa! - Update Alaa released

UPDATE: Alaa has been released and is on his way home.

One is always very ambivalent about this,one is of course happy, but also extremely frustrated, it shouldn´t be happening in the first place... Welcome home Alaa!

Epilogue

This is Alaa´s own words on what happend at Cairo airport, hopefully the end of the story.

Original post - Free Alaa!

Alaa Seif of manalaa.net , blogger extraordinaire and one of the kindest people around in the blogosphere has been detained at cairo Airport, upon arrival from his current home in South Africa.

"Blogger Alaa seif was detained at the airport, & is being transferred to a police station, on charges of evading a sentence over a bad check" (Sandmonkey)

The latest is that he´s still being held at the airport, and not yet transfered to a police station.

Alaa tweeted upon arrival at Cairo Airport and you can follow those tweets, and hopefully he´s tweeting upon release... here

Of course this is not the first time for Alaa to have to deal with this nonsense, the banner used in this blog post, is recycled, it was first used in a campaign to release Alaa and a group of 47 other activists in the early summer of 2006, then he was released after 45 days in Tora prison.

Alaa & Manal and many other bloggers and Human Rights organizations was involved in a marathon case feauturing judge Abdel Fattah Mourad,were the judge tried to block 50 websites after he had been caught with plaugerism of one of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) publications. A case that was more kafkaesque than any other case involving bloggers, perhaps apart from Kareem´s four year prison sentence, and ANHRI opens up for the possibility that this current case might be related to that in some way. If that´s the case i´m not the least surprised.

Here´s an old profile on Youth for Change in the form of an interview with Alaa and Manal.

Free Alaa!

Pic of the weekend

ElBaradei supporters in Kuwait.

Sudanese refugees in Egypt

This is the BBC Arabic TV Open Agenda - اجندة مفتوحة on Sudanese refugees in Egypt It´s also available online, and can be found here.

I would like to point you in the direction of the world´s two most important Human Rights organisations Amnesty International and Human Rights, both of them have issued documents on the same issue. Human Rights has put out a statement and has an URGENT ACTION on two Sudanese refugees in Egypt that risks a forcible return to Sudan on April 12th - Mohamed Adam Abdallah and Ishaq Fadl Dafallah are both from the Zaghawa ethnic community in Darfur (Sudan), and were recognized as refugees by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in Egypt in 2009 because they would face persecution in Sudan if forcibly returned to that country.

They were arrested on August 4th 2009 in the town of Sheikh Zuwayid, close to Egypt’s border with Israel, where they said they had gone to provide assistance to Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers. On April 6th 2010 Mohamed Adam Abdallah were transfered from Cairo to Aswan police station from where he is expected to be forcibly returned to Sudan by ship on 12 April.

Ishaq Fadl Dafallah is currently at Cairo’s Khalifa Police Station, which is used as a deportation centre, and is also expected to be moved soon to Aswan for forcible return to Sudan on 12 April.

Please participate in any way you can to try to stop this. share the information as widely as possible.

You could also read my blog post about migrants in Egypt

I´m sorry for the cut and paste style, i write this in a hurry, mostly because i think it´s very important, so once again bare with me this time.

And yes there´s both presidential and parliamentary elections in Sudan , but it´s for three days, so i might get back to that topic.

The last 31 detainees of 6 April protesters ordered released

After almost two hours of somewhat conflicting messages, it now seems that they are administrating the relase of all 31 detainees.

About an hour ago, the prosecutor ordered the release of the remaining 31 detainees in Cairo.

The names of those released now, would be the same as on this list.

During the last 24 hours 106 protesters in Cairo were detained, and then releassed.

What i think should be required reading for anyone interested is the testimonies that was given yesterday at the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. What strikes me more than anything else, was how easily the security forces used violence against women protesting. This is of course not a new feature, but the casualness/routine of it might be. What is definitely a new occurence is the female officers used, if they were as easily commited to the use of force/violence as their male colleagues, then the stakes for female protestors might be higher in the future.

I will try to post later, until now it has been a case of trying to follow events, and i have a bit of catching up to do before i will be able to process my thoughts into something readable. For now , one is just happy for those who are now free to go home to their loved ones. I also would like to extend my greetings on such a great job to the unsung heroes that worked so hard to make their release possible, the lawyers and all the people and human rights organisations involved in the Front to Defend Egypt Protestors.