Over the past three years, an increasing number of prosecutions of bloggers and Facebook users have taken place in relation to their peaceful expression of opinion online. They have been investigated or charged or sometimes sentenced on criminal charges including defamation, insulting state institutions and “harming” others through telecommunication networks. Amnesty International has examined the cases of 40 bloggers, administrators of widely followed Facebook pages, political activists and human rights defenders, who have been targeted by such prosecutions. These cases point to a worrying trend of people being tried for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression online.
