An Egyptian court has ordered the closure of independent outlet Mada Masr and fined editor-in-chief Lina Attalah three million pounds for running an unlicensed website, a ruling Amnesty International called a crushing blow to press freedom.
An Egyptian court on 27 October ordered the closure of Mada Masr, one of the country's last prominent independent news outlets, and fined its editor-in-chief, Lina Attalah, three million Egyptian pounds (about $53,500) for operating a website without a licence, BBC News and Al Jazeera report. The New Cairo Misdemeanours Court also ordered the confiscation of the outlet's equipment and devices. The ruling rests on Article 105 of Egypt's 2018 media law, and the fine was the maximum available for the charge. Attalah was taken into custody after the verdict and released several hours later, once Mada Masr paid the fine in full.
Mada Masr and its lawyers describe a trial in which the defence was sidelined. According to the outlet and to Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, who attended the hearing, the judge cleared the courtroom of nearly everyone else, rejected the defence's procedural requests and appointed a lawyer to represent Attalah over her own objection, even though eight of her lawyers were present. During her release, Attalah learned that she had also been sentenced in absentia in 2024 to one year in prison on charges of publishing false news and running an unlicensed website; her lawyers have challenged that ruling and a retrial hearing is scheduled for 11 November. Mada Masr says it applied for a licence from the Supreme Council for Media Regulation in 2018 and 2020 without receiving a reply, and that a new application has been pending since June 2023. There was no immediate official comment on the verdict.
Rights groups reacted with alarm. Amnesty International called the decision a crushing blow to press freedom and demanded that it be overturned, while the Committee to Protect Journalists said that if Egypt can shut down the newsroom of one of its most respected editors, no independent journalist in the country is safe. The CPJ counts 25 journalists currently behind bars in Egypt, and on the same day the state security prosecution renewed the detention of six journalists from the fact-checking platform Matsadaash for another 15 days, according to Al Jazeera. The head of the Journalists' Syndicate, Khaled el-Balshy, said the union would take legal action to appeal the ruling.
