3,159 Tweets

Sentenced Years For A Tweet

Ahmed Mansoor Al Shehhi (أحمد منصور الشحي) is a poet. A family man. A social media activist. And since May 2018, a prisoner of conscience in the United Arab Emirates.

Mansoor is currently serving a 10 year prison sentence for his online activities – specifically, ‘promoting false and shaded information’ and ‘serving agendas aimed at spreading hatred and sectarianism’. To put these charges in context, we are republishing the 3,159 most recent posts from his Twitter feed, @Ahmed_Mansoor, in parallel with a machine translation into English. @Ahmed_Mansoor has 16.8K followers, and has been silent since his arrest.

This is followed by a selection of Mansoor’s poetry in Arabic from his collection Beyond the Failure, together with their English translations.

The book concludes with a transcript of an interview with Mansoor, conducted and filmed by Manu Luksch in May 2016, and first published in the journal Surveillance & Society. Images are photographic documentation from the international illustrated #FreeAhmed calls.

Edited by Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Jack Wolf
Designed by Lorenz Klingebiel

Contact us, if you like to run a reprint (double sided A0, b/w) or to request copies