Mauritania has been holding five activists in detention since February over alleged blasphemy and insults to Islam (three others are also facing charges). Their case is being heard in court today.
Quote:Mauritania’s government should drop charges of blasphemy and insulting Islam against eight political activists and release the five held in pretrial detention since February 26, 2020, Human Rights Watch said today. The Nouakchott West Criminal Court is due to hear the case on October 20.
The prosecution accused the eight defendants of “mocking God, his messenger and the Holy Book,” and “creating, recording and publishing messages using an information system that affects the values of Islam,” according to the charge sheet, which Human Rights Watch reviewed. They could face the death penalty if convicted.
Prosecutors have an arsenal of repressive legislation to punish critics for nonviolent speech, including harsh and overbroad laws on terrorism, cybercrime, apostasy, and criminal defamation used to jail human rights defenders, activists, and bloggers.
In July 2019, in an earlier case, authorities freed a blogger, Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir, who had been held in a blasphemy case for five and a half years. After a court sentenced Mkhaitir to death in December 2014, an appeals court converted the penalty to two years in prison, already served. But the authorities held him in solitary and arbitrary detention for another 21 months after that before they released him. Mkhaitir is in exile in France and heads the newly founded AREM.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/19/maur...my-charges
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"