Four years late, media regulator submits rationale for rejecting Mada Masr’s license application

When Mada Masr submitted registration paperwork in 2018 to license its website in accordance with a new media law, state authorities should have responded within 90 days to confirm or deny the request.

However, there was no response.

Shortly after the executive regulations for the media law were issued in 2020, Mada Masr sent a letter to the state media regulator with a copy of its original 2018 application attached, reiterating that it was still intent on having its application to register considered.

Again, there was no response.

Now, nearly four years and a lawsuit filed by Mada Masr to prompt a response later, the state media regulator has given a rationale for its decision to deny the website’s license.

The decision comes as a further escalation against the website, which has been blocked in Egypt for nearly six years through an extralegal measure, and three of Mada Masr's journalists were recently summoned to stand trial for “offending” leading state-aligned officials by reporting on a corruption case implicating the state’s majority party.

The rationale behind the state media regulator's decision came in a Wednesday session before the State Council in the lawsuit Mada Masr filed to seek compensation from the Supreme Media Regulatory Council (SMRC) for the harm caused by its failure to inform the website that its application had been rejected.

Mada Masr filed its lawsuit in October, shortly after learning for the first time that its application for a license had been rejected. Mada Masr Editor-in-Chief Lina Attalah was presented with the rejection letter in September when she was summoned for an interrogation regarding a Mada Masr report that cited sources saying that prominent members of the state-aligned Nation's Future Party were implicated in counts of “gross financial misconduct” monitored by a state watchdog. She was charged with “running a website without the proper license.”

While Attalah and three other Mada Masr journalists were released on bail, which was set at LE20,000 for Attalah and LE5,000 for the three other journalists, the case has resurfaced in recent days, with the three journalists being referred to a court hearing on March 7 on charges of “offending” members of the party.

In Wednesday’s State Council session, a lawyer representing the SMRC presented a report laying out what the council says are its reasons for the rejection of the website’s licensing request.

Chief among the justifications put forward by the regulator is a claim that Mada Masr only submitted an application in 2020, six months after the executive regulations were issued.

Mada Masr initially applied for a license in winter of 2018. The executive regulations were released in February 2020. In August 2020, Mada Masr sent the SMRC a letter reiterating its intent to register and attached a copy of its original license application but received no response.

During the initial two-week window to apply for the license in 2018, Mada Masr communicated with the council several times for clarification on the vague proscriptions and classifications set out by the law.

“Which category outlined by the law do we fit under? Are we an electronic newspaper? An electronic broadcaster? A website? What if we don’t have time to meet all of the requirements, given the short and sudden deadline? Why is all of this happening prior to the issuance of the law’s executive bylaws, which act as a guide to how a law should be implemented and, in the case of this particular law, should be issued within three months of the law’s ratification in August?” Mada Masr wrote in a 2018 editorial, detailing the rationale for applying for the license.

The SMRC also listed several other claims to justify its decision, including: Mada Masr’s application failed to submit proof of the website’s trademark; a number of documents Mada Masr submitted with its application — the SMRC report does not specify the nature of the documents in question — were “not valid;” the application did not include documents from the commercial registry detailing the shareholder structure of the company, despite the fact that Mada Masr is not registered as a joint stock company.

To explain the four-year silence that culminated in a lawsuit to prompt a response, the media regulator claimed that it had informed Mada Masr of its rejection via a notice sent to the company’s registered address but that the notice was returned to the sender.

The regulator also alleged that Attallah had signed off on the refusal notice in person before the SMRC’s secretary general, Mahmoud Fawzy. Atallah denied having done so in a statement to Mada Masr.

Mada Masr is now facing challenges on two fronts: the official denial of its license request and the ongoing investigations into the 2022 report on the Nation’s Future Party.

The investigations into the 2022 report began in October, after hundreds of complaints accusing the journalists of harming the party’s reputation were submitted by law enforcement authorities, lawmakers and members of the state-aligned Nation’s Future Party to the prosecution. One of these complaints was referred to a circuit of the economic court in Mansoura, which is set to try the journalists later this month.

Wednesday’s session at the State Council was adjourned until March 22 to allow Mada Masr’s lawyer time to respond to the regulator’s report justifying its rejection of the license application.

A punitive and often vague media law that set out guidelines for digital media in the country for the first time was ratified by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in August 2018, creating the SMRC and consolidating sweeping regulatory powers over broadcast media and the press. The new law garnered criticism for empowering authorities to censor the press, revoke media licenses and restrict journalists’ work. Since then, authorities have issued vague and ambiguous decisions regarding the legal registration process for media organizations.

Despite the official legislation to manage online news outlets, Egyptian authorities have resorted to extralegal measures to block access to hundreds of websites on Egyptian internet service providers since 2017, including Mada Masr’s website.

Mada Masr Media filed a lawsuit in June 2017 to contest the block imposed against its website. In September 2018, the Supreme Administrative Court referred the lawsuit to experts at the Justice Ministry to review the technical aspects of the state’s interference in the network. The results of the review are yet to be made public.