Egypt’s Mada Masr Chief Lina Attalah Faces Retrial

Lina Attalah, the head of Egypt’s independent outlet Mada Masr, is due to appear in a criminal court on Wednesday, 11 November, facing possible prison time in a retrial that has drawn international attention. 

She is being retried over a one-year prison sentence handed down in absentia (while Attalah was not present in court) in 2024, for operating a news website without a licence and “publishing false news.”

She learned of the sentence last month, upon her release from detention following a separate misdemeanour trial on similar charges.

In that earlier case, a court fined Attalah EGP 3 million (USD 55,000) for operating the website without a licence, and also ordered the closure of Mada Masr. Consequently, an appeal against the shutdown is scheduled for 25 November. 

Her eight-lawyer defence team described a rushed trial in which the judge appointed a defence lawyer for her and then proceeded to write the defence statement on that lawyer’s behalf. 

Attalah had come to court expecting, at worst, a fine. Instead, security personnel detained her. She spent more than seven hours in detention, and was released after supporters crowdsourced the fine and paid it in full.

Speaking to AFP days before the retrial, Attalah said the latest prosecution is an “attempt to silence the last surviving traces of the free press.” 

She said that in recent weeks Egypt has detained the entire staff of the fact-checking platform Matsadaash (Don’t Believe), ordered Mada Masr closed, and informed her of the in absentia sentence. 

On licensing, Attalah said Mada Masr has tried to apply ever since the law was passed in 2018, filing repeated applications over eight years that went unanswered for years. 

“We’re not against regulation; we have a problem when the licensing becomes a tool of control, a tool of exclusion,” she said on 10 November to Agence France-Presse (AFP). 

The Matsadaash staff were arrested in September, and the six journalists remain in detention, which has been renewed several times. 

According to the United Nations (UN) human rights commissioner, who called for their release, they have been subjected to torture and forced to record fabricated confessions. 

On Tuesday, the United Nations criticized what it called Egypt’s widening assaults on press freedom, including the targeting, prosecution and harassment of independent journalists. 

Thameen Al-Kheetan, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Attalah’s prosecution raises fresh concerns regarding due process and fair trial.

The prosecution has drawn condemnation from the European Union and members of the US Congress, and 135 media organizations and rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have described the crackdown as unprecedented. 

CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah said Egyptian authorities must immediately end it, reverse Mada Masr’s shutdown and uphold constitutional protections for press freedom.

Mada Masr was founded in 2013 and has built a reputation for investigative reporting. Egyptian authorities blocked its website in 2017, and it has stayed accessible mainly through mirror links and social media. 

The 2018 media regulation law gave the state’s Supreme Council for Media Regulation power to license outlets and block sites it judges to be spreading false news. 

Security forces then raided Mada Masr’s newsroom in November 2019 and briefly detained Attalah and several colleagues, and the outlet has faced repeated legal and security pressure since.