After more than two years in hiding, Ali Abdulemam, the globally renowned blogger and free-speech advocate, has been freed from the Kingdom of Bahrain. Abdulemam is now safely in Europe, after a dramatic escape in a secret compartment of a car, and will make his first public appearance in more than two years on Wednesday at the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF).

In 1999, Abdulemam created the pro-democracy news website Bahrain Online, the island's first free Internet forum for political and social debate, becoming a pivotal architect of his country's political blogosphere. Because of this, and his related efforts to promote human rights in his country, Abdulemam was detained numerous times by the Bahraini authorities -- eventually imprisoned in September 2010 along with 25 other human-rights activists for "spreading falseinformation" and defaming the king -- and subjected to interrogation, beatings, and torture. Despite being blocked by regime censors, Bahrain Online still regularly gets more than 100,000 hits a day.

In February of 2011 Abdulemam accepted an invitation from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF, OFF's parent organization) to give a talk on dissent in Bahrain. Two weeks later, amid massive anti-government protests, he sent a cryptic tweet and abruptly disappeared. Three days after that, police ransacked his house. In June of 2011, Abdulemam was tried in absentia by a military court and sentenced to 15 years in prison for "plotting" an anti-government "coup."

In 2012, with Abdulemam's whereabouts still unknown, his wife was invited to the Oslo Freedom Forum but was unable to attend because of family commitments. This year,