RSF Prize for Cyber-Dissident

Tunisian cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui has won the first Cyber-Freedom prize offered by the human rights and press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders. Yahyaoui was arrested in June 2002 after his website, TUNeZINE, published an open letter to Tunisian president Ben Ali from an influential judge, Mokhtar Yahyaoui (also Zouhair’s uncle), criticizing the absence of judicial independence in Tunisia. As if to prove the point the article was making, the Tunisian court sentenced Yahyaoui to two years in prison. He remains imprisoned, and he has been staging hunger strikes in protest this year. His fiancée, who is regularly denied access to him, received the 7,600-Euro prize for him in Paris today.