HRW asks govt to free Mahmudur, 4 bloggers

Human Rights Watch has asked the government to drop charges against four bloggers and a newspaper editor arrested this month and release them.
The government should stop targeting individuals and media publishing stories the government deems objectionable and reaffirm its commitment to freedom of expression, a principle which the governing Awami League has long claimed to champion, said a press statement of New York-based HRW.
“By targeting peaceful critics in the media and blogosphere and promising more arrests, the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW.
Referring to recent street agitation, violence and deaths, it said increasingly the protests appear to have sharpened along religious lines, with some Islamist clerics demanding a blasphemy law and with others in the Shahbagh movement publishing statements supporting atheist principles, largely through blogs and other electronic media.
On the arrests of the bloggers, the HRW said the criminal justice authorities cracked down on government critics in the media, including social media. Therefore, the government made clear that the restrictions and arrests will continue.
Police described the arrested bloggers as “known atheists and naturalists” who posted derogatory comments about Islam and Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) on the Internet.
“These bloggers can only be called political prisoners, since they are in jail for peacefully expressing their views,” Adams said. “Freedom of religion also includes the freedom not to believe in a religion and to make those views known. For a government that has always presented itself as liberal and secular this is a huge retreat from the values it claims to uphold.”
The right body termed the arrest of acting editor Mahmudur Rahman as an “attack on free speech” and said Rahman was charged with sedition and unlawful publication of a hacked conversation between an ICT judge and an external consultant. “The conversations exposed political interference with the trials,” it said.