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Egypt’s Lina Attalah Faces Jail as Free Press ‘Silenced’World
Lina Attalah, editor of Egypt’s last major independent outlet Mada Masr, faces a court hearing on Wednesday that could send her to prison for a year.
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Lina Attalah, the editor-in-chief of Mada Masr, one of Egypt’s last major independent news outlets, faces a court hearing on Wednesday that could send her to prison for a year, in the latest step of a crackdown that press freedom groups have called unprecedented.
Attalah, 44, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the independent online outlet, told the AFP news agency in an interview in Cairo on November 8 that Egypt’s latest prosecution of journalists attempts to “silence” the last surviving vestiges of the free press. “It’s hard to separate between those two incidents,” she said. “It seems to be a new chapter in trying to limit the already-limited space that there is for independent media.”
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On Wednesday, Attalah faces a retrial over a one-year prison sentence handed down in absentia in 2024, on charges of operating a website without a licence and “publishing false news”, a charge commonly levelled against journalists in Egypt. She only learned of that sentence when she was detained last month.
In separate proceedings on October 27, the New Cairo Misdemeanours Court convicted Attalah of managing an unlicensed website, fined her three million Egyptian pounds, currently around 55,000 dollars, and ordered the closure of Mada Masr and the confiscation of its equipment. Security forces detained her at the court after the ruling and held her for several hours until supporters had raised the fine and paid it in full. Her appeal against that ruling is scheduled for November 25.
The case comes amid a wider crackdown on independent media. In recent weeks, Egypt has detained the entire staff of Matsadaash, a fact-checking platform, and 26 journalists are currently behind bars in the country. Amnesty International says Attalah faces trial on November 11 on charges of “spreading false information” solely in connection with Mada Masr’s independent journalism, and has called on the authorities to drop the charges and lift the closure order.
The crackdown has been described as “unprecedented” by 135 media organisations and rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and has drawn outcry from the European Union and members of the US Congress. Cairo has long been criticised for its rights record, and has for over a decade shut down nearly all space for dissent.
Mada Masr was established in 2013, in the aftermath of Egypt’s 2011 uprising, and has been blocked inside Egypt since 2017. The outlet says it applied for a licence under Egypt’s 2018 media law without receiving a response, and only learned its application had been rejected when prosecutors raised the issue during another case in 2022. With Egypt’s last surviving outlets under threat, Attalah warned that “there are very few organisations left with expertise of rigorous reporting. So we are left with silence.”
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