Lina Attalah’s retrial adjourned as defense seeks judge’s recusal
An Egyptian court on Wednesday postponed the retrial of Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief of independent news outlet Mada Masr, after her legal team moved to formally recuse the presiding judge over acute concerns regarding judicial bias.
The 9th Circuit of the New Cairo Misdemeanor Court adjourned the hearing until Nov. 18 to allow the defense to file recusal proceedings against Judge Mohamed Mubarak. Attalah faces charges of spreading false news.
The retrial stems from Case No. 3219 of 2024, in which her defense team discovered an existing one-year prison sentence issued against her in absentia while they finalized release procedures in Attalah’s trial last month on charges of running an unlicensed website.
Wednesday’s hearing unfolded under heavy security restrictions inside the New Cairo courtroom, where plainclothes and uniformed officers expelled observers and independent journalists, including reporters from Al Manassa.
Security personnel initially ordered all attendees out of the courtroom under the pretext that the matter constituted a “state security case,” before attempting to limit Attalah’s legal team to just five attorneys. Lina’s lawyers refused to leave, asserting their statutory right to attend, which triggered high-level phone calls by security officers before they locked the courtroom doors to commence the session. Court guards subsequently identified the journalists present and forced them outside.
Attalah’s defense team voiced alarm upon discovering that the bench was once again occupied by Judge Mubarak, the same judge who rejected all substantive defense requests during the earlier trial on Oct. 27.
In those proceedings, Mubarak denied defense lawyers time to review case files, appointed an unwanted state-assigned counsel against Attalah’s express wishes, imposed a 3 million Egyptian pound fine, ordered the site shut down, and confiscated its equipment.
To avert an immediate ruling, Attalah’s defense attorney, Hassan El-Azhary, filed an expedited recusal request immediately as the session opened. Court administrators had scheduled the case on the docket under “reserved for judgment”—designating it for an immediate verdict on day one of the retrial, rather than listing it for witness testimony or oral pleadings.
Egyptian procedural law mandates the immediate suspension of trial proceedings once an official recusal motion is submitted, pending a ruling by a designated circuit of the Court of Appeal. Under the code of procedure, litigants can demand a judge’s removal on narrow grounds of proven bias, personal hostility, or preconceived prejudice that prevents an impartial adjudication.
If the appellate court rejects the petition, it fines the applicant and returns the suit to the original bench; if it upholds the motion, it strips the judge of jurisdiction and reassigns the case to a new circuit.
El-Azhary presented a specialized power of attorney authorizing recusal, prompting Mubarak to suspend the hearing temporarily. Mubarak later summoned El-Azhary to the deliberation room, returned the document, and formally granted the adjournment until Nov. 18 to allow defense filings before the Court of Appeal.
Speaking to Al Manassa, El-Azhary explained that he represented Attalah through a legal power of attorney, noting that Egyptian criminal procedural rules do not mandate the personal physical appearance of defendants in misdemeanor dockets when formal legal counsel appears to argue motions.
The defense will formally lodge a recusal memorandum, El-Azhari explained, within one week anchored to three fundamental pillars: procedural violations that compromised the previous hearing, the presiding judge’s preconceived bias regarding the identical facts and charges, and an extraordinary public statement issued by the Supreme Judicial Council that openly commented on the substantive merits of the litigation before judicial oversight bodies could review official defense complaints.
The Supreme Judicial Council’s statement had attempted to defend the court’s denial of defense requests for an adjournment, asserting that Attalah paid the fine and waived her right to appeal in writing. The defense publicly contested that claim, stating that Attalah never waived her appellate rights and that defense attorneys visited the New Cairo prosecution office to file an appeal against the Oct. 27 ruling, yet officials stalled throughout the day without providing access to the case file or releasing an official transcript of the verdict.
The courtroom confrontation came just 24 hours after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Egyptian authorities on Tuesday to halt an escalating crackdown on press freedom, demanding an immediate end to the judicial targeting of Attalah and the release of the detained editorial team of independent fact-checking platform Matsadaash.