Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, a 24-year-old Egyptian student, blogged under the name “Kareem Amer” starting in 2004. He captured authorities’ attention the next year. Soliman denounced attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and panned extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo — and risked his life in the process. Things only got worse for Soliman.

“It causes us to cry, be grieved, and be struck with frustration to find ourselves threatened with death,” he wrote on May 7, 2006, after escaping 20 fellow students wielding knives, leather belts and sticks who had surrounded his taxi outside the university. “Not because we kill. Not because we loot others’ property. Not because we transgress the limits of our freedom. But because we think!” In February 2007, Soliman was sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting Islam” and one year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak. “I shall not recant, not even by an inch, from any word I have written,” read Soliman’s last blog post before his Nov. 6, 2006, arrest, when authorities were closing in. “These restrictions will not preclude my dream of obtaining my freedom.”

Of his goals, he wrotes on his blog, “I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations… I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.”

And so he sits in a prison, disowned by the father who said his son should be executed under sharia law if he did not repent. Egypt has turned a deaf ear to the growing global chorus demanding his freedom.

Now Soliman’s final appeal has been rejected, and he’s ineligible for release until November 2010. To learn more about the campaign to free this blogger and to help out, visit the Free Kareem website.