A Saudi court sentenced seven young men to prisonfor terms ranging between 5 and 10 years, and prevent them from traveling, on charges of “disobeying the Guardian."

A Saudi court sentenced seven young men to prisonfor terms ranging between 5 and 10 years, and prevent them from traveling, on charges of “disobeying the Guardian” and inciting demonstrations through the social website Facebook, a Human Rights Watch organization statement said Monday.

The Saudi prosecutor accused the seven as well of violating the Anti-Cyber Crime Act, which prohibits the broadcast of materials that negatively affect the public affairs.

The humanetarian organization stated that the Criminal Court specialized to consider the issues of terrorism, had issued last Monday rulings regarding the seven Saudis, all from the eastern region.

"The authorities arrested seven in September 2011 and put them in jail in Dammam city for a year and a half before getting charged last spring," HRW noted.

"Sending people to jail because of a peaceful page on Facebook confirms the absence of any safe way to talk publicly in Saudi Arabia, even in the social network websites," the deputy director of the HRW Middle East Bureau, Joe Stork, said.

One of the charged, Abdulhamid Amer, has been sentenced to ten years in prison after being convicted on charges of "creating pages on Facebook, recruiting other peoples and inviting them to the protests’ squares," he added.

Meanwhile, the European Union called for "condemning these provisions" and takling the subject with the Saudi authorities.