Algerian cartoonist Abdelhamid Amine, known as Nime, walked free less than a month into his prison sentence on the second day of 2020. He had been detained for his tongue-in-cheek drawings that had irked the authorities in the lead-up to the recent presidential election. 

Nime was among 180 to 200 others detained for political reasons since the beginning of the hirak, the mass protest movement that took to the streets Feb. 22 in opposition to the fifth mandate of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and boycotted the December poll. 

Nime was arrested Nov. 26 after protesters started reproducing his sketches on banners mocking the election. On one, army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah and interim President Abdelkader Bensalah place a golden slipper on Abdelmajid Tebboune, who won the election. On Dec. 11, Nime was given a one-year sentence, three months of which would be served in prison and nine months suspended.

In a surprise move last week, Nime and 75 other political detainees were released, according to the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees. Some had completed their sentences but others were let out early, although their convictions and charges still stand. Among those liberated were Lakhdar Bouregaa, a veteran from the country’s war for independence, protesters who had waved the Berber flag, a 25-year-old activist known as “the poet of the hirak” and several members of the activist group Rassemblement Action Jeunesse.