Amnesty International on Rahman Case

The Associated Press is reporting that the human rights group Amnesty International has adopted the cause of the Bangladeshi cartoonist Mohammed Arifur Rahman. Rahman was detained last Fall after a cartoon he created for the newspaper Prothom Alo that contained wordplay around the name "Muhammed" angered certain political and religious groups. What was originally believed to be a 30-day period of detention made possible under laws allowing officials to bring controversial figures into custody to deflect threats against those persons and to mitigate against extremes in the protests themselves, has become a months-long ordeal with Rahman still being held and officials saying little about how a case against the twenty-something artist might be processed or when this might take place. Rhetoric from the human rights organization seems to reflect the harsher realties rather than the specifics of what is admittedly pretty open-to-abuse law. The article cites AI as pointing to one potential outcome for Rahman a two-year jail sentence, and although I can't figure out their source on that, it seems to match up with what I generally recall about non-cartoon cases of a similar nature.
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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