Dr Heba Youssef

Dear friends and readers of Mada, We have been silent over the past two days, in shock at what happened in court on Tuesday but also in an attempt to organize ourselves for what looks like it will be an ongoing battle.

Mada Masr Editor-in-Chief Lina Attalah was fined LE3 million by the New Cairo Misdemeanor Court, which convicted her on charges of managing an unlicensed website, issuing an order for the website’s closure. Attalah was taken into custody after the issue of the ruling. Tuesday’s session at the ninth circuit of the New Cairo Misdemeanor Court, presided over by judge Mohamed Mubarak, was temporarily suspended for deliberations after Attalah’s defense counsel requested time to review the case file. After the court returned from deliberations, the judge ordered the courtroom cleared of everyone except Attalah and her defense counsel, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights’ executive director Hossam Bahgat, who was also present, told Mada Masr. The room then filled with plainclothes officers and guards, with a National Security Agency officer in attendance, he added. The presiding judge and a Supreme State Security Prosecution representative returned to the session and the judge announced that the court has decided to stand by its rejection of all the procedural arguments presented by the defense, including requests to bring in any documentation or hear any witnesses. The judge then asked the defense team to present its plea. The counsel insisted that it would not submit a plea as long as its requests were unanswered by the court. The judge then abruptly asked for a lawyer unknown to any member of the defense counsel to be brought in, “in a move that astonished all those present,” said Bahgat, and announced that the court decided to appoint a lawyer for Attalah. At that point, all members of the defense counsel cried out to reject the court’s appointment of a lawyer when the eight chosen lawyers were present. Attalah herself spoke to say she did not accept the court-appointed lawyer acting on her behalf, an objection the judge refused to have recorded in the session’s minutes. "In an even more shocking move,” said Bahgat, the judge himself began to log down the requests of the court-appointed lawyer, without the lawyer having said a word. The judge then read out the conviction amid shouts and protests from the defense counsel. The judge sentenced Attalah to the maximum possible penalty: a LE3 million fine, the closure of Mada Masr’s website and the confiscation of its property. Security personnel then surrounded Attalah, lifted her off the ground and took her out of the courtroom, where she remains in custody in the courthouse.