Imprisoned Saudi writer Raif bin Muhammad Badawi was on my mind this week, as he often is when questions of free speech arise. He was arrested in 2012 and faced the death penalty over charges of apostasy. Lucky for him, he was only sentenced to a decade in prison, torture, 1000 lashes and a fine. The then 25-year-old husband and father of three dared question why Saudi women needed a male guardian to walk down the street — or indeed why all Saudis were required to believe in Islam — on a website he set up to foster a discussion of liberalism. Amnesty International, for what it’s worth, determined he was “a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression”.