Bassel Khartabil, Syrian computer programmer and engineer (died 2015)

Bassel Khartabil, also known as Bassel Safadi, was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015. Human rights organizations say that he was detained for his activities in support of freedom of expression, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered his detention to have been arbitrary.