London, 25-3-2017
Arab Media Freedom Monitor “Ikshef” rejects the sentence issued today by a court of with a three-year suspended sentence against former head of Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate, Yehia Qalash, and his colleagues Khaled Al-Balshi, former deputy head of EJS Jamal Abdul-Rahim, former secretary general and member of its current council.
The Observatory stresses that the sentence has condemned the victim, the three journalists who defended their syndicate and the implementation of the law while ignoring the real culprit, the Ministry of the Interior, which broke into the syndicate’s building in violation of the law, which requires the presence of the representative of the Public Prosecution and the presence of EJS’ head of or someone representing him at the moment of entry and inspection, which was not done.
Ikshef confirms that the ruling, which eased the previous sentence of two years’ imprisonment to suspended one year imprisonment, is an unjustified condemnation of the three journalists, even if it avoids the issue of implementation that could have been met with public journalists’ anger, even with an international outrage.
Ikshef notes that the ruling comes in the context of systematic repression of press freedom in Egypt and attempts to further domesticize and tame it in favor of the existing regime. These attempts began with shutting down many newspapers and channels the first days of the military coup on July 3, 2013 and continued with imprisonment of more journalists (96 ones according to our latest statistics), and amounted to the storming of the EJS building in early May 2016 and the arrest of journalists from within, and the issuance of some new legislation that impose more domination of the executive authority on the media institutions, and finally the ruling issued today.
Ikshef calls on all concerned with the freedom of the press in Egypt and abroad to act and exert all their efforts to save the freedom of the press in Egypt and to support the Egyptian journalists in their battle against the attack by the executive authority.
