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Freedom of speech is the air that any thinker breathes; it s the fuel that ignites the fire of an intellectual s thoughts. Raif Badawi dared to write such things in Saudi Arabia. And he exercised his own freedom of speech, asking questions about faith and challenging extremism in that country so he was imprisoned for apostasy for 10 years. He was flogged, although he s not yet received the 1,000 lashes he was sentenced to, because a doctor determined it was too much. He s been separated from his young family since his detention in 2014.
His legal team has written of the various ways his imprisonment is unjust. In 2018, they wrote in Time: His sentence of lashings was itself illegal as physical torture is prohibited under the Arab Charter on Human Rights, ratified by Saudi Arabia in 2009, and the U.N. s Convention Against Torture, which the nation ratified in 1997. The criminalization of Badawi was ultimately the criminalization of the protected rights he sought to exercise an