The attorney — a former Qatari justice minister who later helped defend the toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — knows he has given himself an ambitious agenda. He first seeks to prove the poet was convicted on an allegedly falsified confession.
He is then setting his sights on trying to reform legal codes to give more room for free expression in Qatar, a nation with a rapidly expanding international profile.
“Do we want this to be a region where any political opinion runs of risk of bringing a criminal charge?” said defence lawyer Najeeb Al Nauimi in an interview with The Associated Press in his Doha office.
“The system has to reform itself. This is my mission.” The appeal seeks to overturn the most severe punishment from the Web crackdowns: the life sentence in late November against a well-known poet, Muhammad Ibn Al Dheeb Al Ajami, for a verse deemed as encouragement to fight the ruling system.
While each country has its own legal procedures and laws, the region is moving toward greater integrations of all policies.
The poet’s case will be closely followed — by both authorities and activists — as a message on how far officials can go in muzzling cyberspace.
Qatari officials have declined to comment on the poet’s conviction or appeal. Even the basis for the charges is difficult to pin down. Al Ajami, 37, has been jailed awaiting trial since November 2011.
He was taken into custody months after an Internet video was posted of him reciting Tunisian Jasmine, a poem lauding that country’s popular uprising, which touched off the Arab Spring rebellions across the Middle East.
But the actual charges appear to be built around an earlier online dispute in August 2010, before the Arab Spring, said attorney Al Nauimi.
