A military court in Cairo yesterday dropped charges against Ahmed Mostafa, the young blogger who was arrested a fortnight ago and accused of "tarnishing the image" of the armed forces.

He had written in his Arabic-language blog about someone being removed from a military college so that a rich kid could take his place. 

The use of a military court to try a civilian blogger for grumbling about corruption was widely seen as a backward step and an abuse of a system that had been intended to protect national security. Protests followed, in Egypt and outside; Human RIghts Watch and Amnesty International both complained. 

According to Mostafa's lawyer, the case was dropped after he was instructed not to repeat his "offence". The Egyptian Chronicles blog says he has been told to remove the post but 
it is still there.

Although the Egyptian authorities have won some praise for eventually seeing sense, there are still far too many of these ridiculous cases coming to court. Last year, for example, an amateur poet was sentenced to three years in jail and fined $18,000 for “insulting” President Mubarak in unpublished verses. It was only when the media kicked up a fuss that an appeal court quashed his sentence.

Now that the case against Mostafa is not being pursued, I wonder if anyone in authority will investigate his complaint about the military college to find out if it is true.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 8 March 2010.