Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania's Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania's Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been one of them.
I met Hanevy, now 34, for the first time last year, and I asked him about why he broke with the Islamists as an 18-year-old. He expressed disgust with the government's and elite society's tolerance of slavery. He also recounted the horror of witnessing a massacre of black Africans, a minority in Mauritania. The corrosive impact of his country's dictatorship and religious extremism, he explained, stunted society. Instead of a radical cleric, he became a reformer committed to secular democracy.
In 2007, Hanevy seized upon a unique opportunity. The fall of a 20-year dictatorship and presidential elections suggested that the time was ripe for new democratic experiments. He launched Taqadoumy.com (Arabic for "progressive"), a news portal in Arabic, French and English featuring investigative journalism unparalleled in the Arab world.
Despite limited resources, Hanevy recruited a team of reporters and was soon running the country's most-read news site—the local equivalent of the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post. Taqadoumy fearlessly exposed scandals and corruption, attracting thousands of readers with photos and documents providing hard evidence for sensational scoops.
But exposing the corruption of top government officials—including current president Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz— brought retribution. Days after his Web site posted videos and photos of the president's agents falsifying ballots during last July's presidential election, he was arrested without a warrant.
After the fact, government officials invented a charge: publishing items "contrary to Islam and decent behavior." One of Taqadoumy's most popular sections is its open forum, where the country's frustrated youth have space to vent. The forum's motto draws on Voltaire's apocryphal words: "I may hate your opinion, but I will die for your right to say it."
But one young woman used the space to call for more sexual freedom. For that posting, a judge sentenced Hanevy to six months in Dar Naim, a prison whose Orwellian name means "House of Bliss."
Despite an international campaign by human-rights activists to free him, Hanevy served out his time, composing columns on scraps of paper as his staff continued to run the site. On Dec. 24, the sentence was complete, but jail officials would not allow him to return home. He remains indefinitely detained and recently held a 15-day hunger strike.
While independent North African journalists are often sent packing on a dictator's whim, the case of Hanevy Ould Dahah stands out for its brazenness. Even repressive regimes like to maintain the fiction of due process, so the decision to detain him for weeks after his sentence ended marked a dangerous new precedent.
On Jan. 14, in a cruel twist, the Supreme Court declared his trial illegal, and announced that he would be retried. Hanevy will thus remain in prison and will likely be resentenced for the same alleged crime.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has launched an urgent campaign on his behalf, calling Hanevy the victim of "a relentless campaign of persecution." Yet the organization's appeal to President Ould Abdel Aziz has gone unaddressed.
The State Department, which last year provided Hanevy with a visa to study English in the U.S., has not commented publicly on his plight. Nevertheless, the young journalist's courageous work evokes President Obama's declaration in Cairo in June of last year—that "all people yearn . . . for the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed."
Like millions of Muslims who listened to the president's words, Hanevy heard a call to action. If the U.S. is sincere in its support for democratic reform, the administration will publicly demand the immediate release of Hanevy Ould Dahah. He—and dissidents across the Middle East—are waiting.
Mr. Lum, a writer based in Boston, is a member of the American Islamic Congress's New England Council.
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