Cairo court orders Mada Masr closed and fines its editor the legal maximum

A Cairo misdemeanour court on Tuesday 27 October convicted Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Mada Masr, of establishing and managing a website without a licence under Egypt’s 2018 press and media law. The Media Line reports the court fined her EGP 3 million — about US$54,000, and the maximum the 2018 law permits — ordered the site closed, ordered the confiscation of the outlet’s equipment, and had Attalah taken into custody pending payment. Her lawyer, Hassan al-Azhari, said the legal team intended to appeal. Attalah had been questioned and referred to trial on 22 October, a date that appears in secondary sourcing and should be read as such. Democracy Now, which carried the verdict, reports that Mada Masr published an editorial earlier in the week reading in part: “We understand that a sword will most likely be raised above our heads very soon.”

Assessment: The charge is administrative, which is the point. A licensing conviction requires no argument about what was published; it converts an editorial problem into a filing problem, and the penalty schedule does the rest — closure, confiscation, custody. The appeal is the live variable, and the fine’s size determines whether the outlet can function while it runs. One caution for readers tracking this through aggregators: at least one has rendered the penalty as €850, two orders of magnitude off the EGP 3 million in the primary reporting. The number that travels is not always the number a court imposed.