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Human Rights Watch Asks Syria to Free Teen Blogger From Detention

by Amar Toor on September 20, 2010 at 03:00 PM

damascus, syriaIn December 2009, Syrian security forces detained 19-year-old high school student and blogger Tal al-Mallohi without ever justifying their decision. For the next nine months, Syrian authorities prohibited the girl from communicating with her family, and never even offered an explanation for why they targeted her in the first place. On September 1st, al-Mallohi's mother finally issued a plea to President Bashar al-Asad, begging for more information on her daughter. With the mother's pleas having fallen on deaf ears, however, Human Rights Watch has now publicly called upon the government to release the blogger from her apparently unfounded detention.

Although the Syrian government has a history of cracking down on political activists and dissidents for "weakening national sentiment," al-Mallohi's case seems decidedly more peculiar. While her blog does contain poetry and social commentary that sympathizes with the Palestinian cause, it's virtually devoid of any content relating to Syrian politics. Some activists within the country, however, have speculated that the student may have been detained because of a poem she wrote, in which she criticized the country's hard-line approach to freedom of expression.

Regardless of the true motive, though, officials at Human Rights Watch seem intent on drawing more international attention to al-Mallohi's plight. "Detaining a high school student for nine months without charge is typical of the cruel, arbitrary behavior of Syria's security services," wrote HRW's Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson in a post on the organization's website. "A government that thinks it can get away with trampling the rights of its citizens has lost all connection to its people."

Tags: blogger, blogging, censorship, FreedomOfSpeech, government, HumanRights, HumanRightsWatch, MiddleEast, politics, syria

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