Call it crazy, but the widespread crackdown of people abusing the law and taking them toward higher levels for that matter has totally gone out of hand. The latest blow was the reported imprisonment of an Egyptian journalist named Huwaida Mitwalli for reporting a supposed torture in Egypt.

This is totally outrageous and surely violates the acclaimed freedom of the press. Authorities have had their problems on upholding the law and properly identifying the proper means of holding back information. While everyone knows that hot news is the actual bread and butter of journalists, being convicted for reporting something that is indeed factual is totally ridiculous today. Things are simply becoming personal and abusive in any nation at this point.

The sentencing of Al-Jazeera journalist Huwaida Taha Mitwalli to six months in prison for her reporting on torture in Egypt makes a mockery of World Press Freedom Day, Human Rights Watch said today.

Mitwalli, an Egyptian national who also reports for the London-based daily Quds al-Arabi, was convicted by a Cairo criminal court on May 2 for “possessing and giving false pictures about the internal situation in Egypt that could undermine the dignity of the country” in connection with an Al-Jazeera documentary about torture in Egypt. The court also fined her 20,000 Egyptian pounds (US$3,518).

“Egypt’s sorry record of torture is only made worse by its practice of punishing journalists who dare to speak about it,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. – Egypt: Prison for Al-Jazeera Journalist Who Exposed Torture

[tags]blog news, blogger news, freedom of the press, politics, law[/tags]