A blogger from Libya has been sentenced to a year and a half in prison for expressing his opinions on his blog.

52-years-old Abd al-Raziq al-Mansuri, kept a blog where he criticized the government. He has been arrested and sentenced to a year and a half in prison by the state.

The court convicted them for illegal handgun possession but the Human Rights Watch organization sustains that the arrest was an attempt to silence dissent. It was true that there was a weapon found in his house but it was an old pistol belonging to his father.

His family declared that the authorities asked them to proclaim that al-Mansuri is mentally deranged. Furthermore, when contacted by the Human Rights Watch, the government refused to give more information about the case. “The gun charges are a ruse,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The authorities went after al-Mansuri because they did not like what he wrote.”

Unfortunately this is not the first case. The Egyptian authorities arrested a student from the law university who criticised the government and the Islam on his blog. Other cases of censure had been discovered in China, Myanmar, Singapore and Iran.

And we live in the 21st century…