Egypt is trying to silence the last surviving parts of its free press, the editor of the country’s best-known independent outlet has said, days before she faces a court retrial that could send her to prison.

Lina Attalah, founder and editor-in-chief of Mada Masr, told AFP that the latest prosecutions of journalists marked a new chapter in squeezing the already narrow space for independent media in Egypt. “It seems to be a new chapter in trying to limit the already-limited space that there is for independent media,” she said.

In recent weeks, Egyptian authorities detained the entire staff of the fact-checking platform Matsadaash, ordered the closure of Mada Masr, and told Attalah she had been handed a one-year prison sentence in her absence. “It’s hard to separate between those two incidents,” she said of the two cases.

Attalah is one of Egypt’s most prominent journalists, and 26 journalists are currently behind bars in the country, according to the report. Her prosecution has drawn international criticism, including from the European Union and members of the United States Congress. A total of 135 media organisations and rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have described the current crackdown as “unprecedented”.

“With Egypt’s last surviving outlets under threat, there are very few organisations left with expertise of rigorous reporting,” Attalah said. “So we are left with silence.”

Last month, a misdemeanours court fined Attalah three million Egyptian pounds — around $55,000 — for operating the website without a licence. She told AFP that Mada Masr had repeatedly tried to apply for a licence since the law was passed in 2018, but went years without a response. “We’re not against regulation; we have a problem when the licensing becomes a tool of control, a tool of exclusion,” she said.

Her eight-lawyer defence team described a rushed trial in which the judge appointed her a defence lawyer himself, then wrote the defence statement on that lawyer’s behalf. Attalah was then lifted off the ground and detained by security staff in the courtroom. “It felt like I was being kidnapped from the courtroom,” she said. “I did not hear the verdict as I was being pulled by the cops.”

She spent more than seven hours in detention, having arrived at court expecting at most a fine. It was only after her release that night, once supporters had crowdsourced the fine and paid it in full, that she learned the court had also ordered Mada Masr to shut down. An appeal against that ruling is scheduled for November 25.

Attalah was also told that in 2024 she had been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison for operating without a licence and “publishing false news” — a charge often used against journalists in Egypt. She faces a retrial in that case on Wednesday, November 11. “I’m hoping for this to be dropped, because journalists should not be in jail,” she said. “I should not go to jail. The Matsadaash journalists should not be in jail. The rest of the 26 journalists should not be in jail.”

The crackdown began with the arrest of the six-person team at Matsadaash, a fact-checking and open-source investigation page run by young journalists. The team was detained in late September and remains in pretrial detention, charged with terrorism and spreading false news. The case then reached Mada Masr, founded in 2013 in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.

“We should be allowed to go back to our newsrooms and not spend our days in courtrooms,” Attalah said, adding that until the cases are resolved, “there isn’t much journalism” she and her team of 50 can do. Mada Masr has survived repeated website blocks and closure orders, and is widely regarded as a crucial source of reporting on the Arab world’s most populous country.

Attalah argued that press freedom was part of Egypt’s stability, not a threat to it. “Egypt is celebrated for being a haven of stability in the midst of a lot of instability in the region,” she said, but “a margin of political space for civil and political rights is part of the stability calculus.” A belief that “stability can happen by just investing in power and the status quo”, she added, “is the wrong bet”.

Source: Bangkok Post (via AFP) and Global Voices.