Sami Ben Gharbia - Global Voices

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Sami Ben Gharbia is an experienced human rights campaigner, a Tunisian who has lived in exile in the Netherlands.

He grew up in a country and region where freedom of speech has been the biggest enemy and threat to despotic regimes, whereas the old Islamic philosophers and logicians used to present Man as a “speaking animal.” Blogging gave him back the quintessence of his humanity. In his opinion, freedom of speech and blogging are inextricably intertwined.

In early 1998, he was arrested and interrogated by the Tunisian State Security about his activities and travels. When he realized that this was just the beginning of a cycle of harassment and persecutions, he fled Tunisia. In 2003, Sami started his personal homepage and published the first Tunisian e-book "Borj Erroumi XL."

He is the Advocacy Director at Global Voices and the co-founder of nawaat.org.

Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.