A Lebanese national has been arrested for allegedly insulting the country's president, Michel Sleiman, on Facebook

Ahmad Shuman was detained shortly after he arrived in Beirut's international airport on a flight from Kiev. According to prosecutors, Shuman committed "libel, slander and defamation" when he and three friends set up a page on the social networking website to criticize President Sleiman. Although widely seen as the Arab world's most democratic state, Lebanon has strict laws created to punish those who insult the president. The office is seen as the embodiment of the republic, although the position of prime minister, presently held by Saad Hariri, is considered more powerful. The four men created a page on the website that carried the title "We don't want a hypocrite as president". The page has been taken down, but a cached version carried a lengthy essay criticizing Sleiman's performance as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It also attacked the "vagueness" of his political position, claiming that he had tried to be both pro-American and pro-Syrian at the same time, and that he had ruled out peace with Israel while also backing negotiations with the Jewish state. The four men called the president "the worst kind of failure" and wrote disparaging comments elsewhere on the website. Shuman's colleagues, Naim Hanna, Antoine Ramia and Shebel Qasab, all in their twenties, were arrested and charged with the same offenses in June 2010. It is the first time in Lebanon that such charges have been brought against individuals for comments they made on the Internet, a fact that has prompted strong criticism from human rights groups. The four men face up to two years in prison if convicted.