On 6th anniversary of block of Mada’s website, State Council rejects lawsuit challenging license denial

Mada Masr’s bid to challenge the denial of its website licensing application was turned down by an administrative court on Wednesday.

The decision on the lawsuit — which was filed before the Court of Administrative Justice in October to request a license to operate Mada Masr’s website and challenge the Supreme Media Regulatory Council’s rejection of a 2018 license application — came on the same day that Mada Masr’s website was blocked six years ago through an extralegal measure.  

The suit also demanded compensation for material and moral damages incurred through the council’s failure to inform Mada of its rejection within the appropriate legal timeframe set out by a punitive 2018 media law.

Mada Masr’s lawyer Hassan al-Azhari said he would appeal the ruling before the Supreme Administrative Court after the Court of Administrative Justice clarifies its reasoning for rejecting the suit. 

Mada Masr submitted registration paperwork in 2018 to license its website in accordance with the new media law. Per the law, state authorities should have responded within 90 days to approve 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. Yet again, there was no response. 

Mada Masr filed the lawsuit that was rejected on Wednesday 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 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 a March hearing before the Court of Administrative Justice, a lawyer representing the SMRC presented a report laid out for the first time what the council said are its reasons for the rejection of Mada Masr's licensing request.

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

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.

According to Azhari, the law permits websites to apply for a license more than once. Mada Masr intends to pursue this course of action, especially given that all required paperwork was provided in the initial application yet the SMRC rejected the application because it claimed that certain parts were missing.

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.

Access to Mada Masr’s website was among some of the first websites to be blocked on May 24, 2017, along with dozens of other websites, many of them news sites. 

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.

The media law ratified by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in August 2020 gives the Supreme Media Regulatory Council the power to ban websites, blogs and online accounts. The SMRC is the third body in Egypt vested with this power. Investigative authorities and criminal investigative bodies were also granted the same power by the cybercrime law, which Sisi ratified in 2018.