CAIRO: An Egyptian-Christian blogger has been denied release by Egypt's ministry of interior, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) reported on Wednesday. The move comes after Egyptian courts have called for his release on a previous three occasions, but the ministry continues to issue arrest warrants that keep Hani Nazeer Aziz in jail. Aziz blogs on Karz al-Hob, which, according to ANHRI, was removed from the Internet by Egyptian authorities following a crackdown of bloggers in October 2008. ANHRI says Aziz was arrested under the pretext of the emergency law, “without any charge or crime since October 2008″ and “has been issued a fourth release decision by State Security Court, after lawyers of ANHRI's freedom of expression legal aid unit submitted a memorandum to the court detailing how security forces kidnapped Hani's brothers as hostage until he would turn himself in.” The Cairo-based rights group says that the blogger has committed no crime and should be released. They added that a church leader had helped security “to get hold of Hani in October 2008,” when the blogger was arrested and taken to the infamous Borg al-Arab prison. According to ANHRI, the Christian blogger has been subjected to a series of violations since he was detained over one year ago. ANHRI, in a press statement listed the abuses against Aziz: “abduction of his brothers; threatening to arrest his sisters; Church cleric cooperating with security against him; detaining him as a criminal rather than a political prisoner; pressuring him to convert to Islam to be released; forcing him to tell the password of his blog, which was then erased by state security; preventing ANHRI lawyers from visiting him; and security declining on the implementation of four judicial decisions to release him.” ANHRI condemned the actions of the government, saying, “the Egyptian interior minister, being responsible for the state security department, ought to feel proud that his men are so shielded off from accountability and punishment, and that judiciary independence has become a meaningless slogan that some officials use to deceive the public opinion in Egypt.” It added that these types of cases, similar in nature to Aziz's and “other prisoners of conscience as well as victims of impunity in Egypt, will be the living proof of the lies of the Egyptian government in Geneva during the presentation of Egypt’s report on human rights conditions in Egypt during the last four years.” BM
