Abbou, a human rights lawyer, was arrested by Tunisian secret police on March 1, 2005, and handed a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence the next month. The verdict was based on an Internet article that “defamed the judicial process” and was “likely to disturb public order,” but the government provided no details as to when the material appeared or what it said.
Abbou wrote for a banned Tunisian news Web site, Tunisnews, comparing torture in Tunisia’s prisons with that of Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib. An appeals court upheld the verdict on June 10, 2005.