Extraordinary times: Lina Attalah’s first day in court
Outside the New Cairo court, and along the streets around it, a number of senior officers had finished taking up their unusual formation. They stood watching the passersby, and the sergeants and rank-and-file officers checking the IDs of anyone who wanted to get in at the gate, as the cordon closed tight around the building. Across the street, our colleague Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief of Mada Masr, waited among her defense team and a knot of supporters, steeling herself for the first session of her trial on a charge of running the site without a license. It was calm, at first.
By nine o’clock the sidewalk was filling. European diplomats had come early, among them representatives of EU member states, Switzerland, Britain and Canada. Journalists kept arriving, some who had once worked at Mada Masr or written for it, others who had simply come to stand beside a colleague, and with them a delegation from Al Manassa, representatives of several rights groups and a few public figures.
The Cairo Court of First Instance, where Lina would soon stand trial, sits on Tarh Al-Bahr Street in the heart of the Fifth Settlement suburb, beside the New Cairo prosecution complex. Facing it, past the narrow sidewalk where Lina and her supporters stood, lay a stretch of ground that looked more like a waste dump than a lot: sand, stones, and trash strewn here and there. A pack of stray dogs roamed it, and every so often their barking tore across the questions the lawyers were being asked, questions that gave away the tension beneath the calm.
The lawyers expected it to be over within the hour. The case was first on the roll, the first session in the case, which usually means procedure: the defense asks for an adjournment to go through the file, learn what the charge actually rests on, and prepare. They had been denied that file before Lina was rushed to trial, eight days after she was first summoned to the Supreme State Security Prosecution and five days after the single interrogation held with her.
An offer you can’t refuse
Then it was ten o’clock. Lina said goodbye to her friends and supporters and walked into the court with her lawyers. The journalists made for the metal barriers lined up in front of the gate, ready to go in and cover the session, and the supporters followed, believing that the Egyptian constitution, which guarantees open trials, applied in the Fifth Settlement.
They were not getting in. A plainclothes investigations officer drew the syndicate journalists aside, photographed their press IDs, and said he would send them to the court president for permission. Everyone else got a brigadier from the security detail, who told them he had instructions from the court president to admit no one but Lina and her defense team. He asked them, with polite finality, to “stand in the shade,” back from the gate, and insisted that he had every right to keep out “anyone with no business in there.”
They tried to reason with him: the open trials guaranteed by the Constitution, they said, meant that citizens could walk into courtrooms. He dared them to remind him of the law that lets any citizen walk into any court or public building in the country. Nothing moved him, and he closed the discussion with an offer they couldn’t refuse: wait at the café across from the court, beyond the end of the waste dump, until the session was over.
Having failed to get in as citizens, some of the supporters trudged off to the café. Others, journalists and supporters who had turned up late, tried their luck at the gate with one excuse or another, and a few made it through. The journalists who had handed their press IDs to the investigations officer stayed where they were, waiting on the presiding judge’s answer.
Then our colleague Eman Ouf, a Press Syndicate board member and head of its freedoms committee, arrived to attend the trial on the syndicate’s behalf. They stopped her too. She insisted, and it got her nowhere, so she joined her colleagues in the wings.
The supporters turned their backs on the wasteland and settled into a long row along the sidewalk opposite the court, passing around bottles of water, cigarettes and guesses about what the judge would do. Everyone had a few hopeful words ready, small things to set against the dread sitting on every chest.
“Going in to check the roll”
Our professional and journalistic duty demands more than standing in solidarity with our colleagues and lining up beside them; it requires us to do our job of reporting, covering and following the story, however tight the siege and however many bans are imposed. So in the middle of all this skirmishing, one of Al Manassa’s journalists slipped into the court, right under the nose of the cordon. “Where are you going, sir?” a guard asked. He pulled out an old press ID and said, “I’m going in to check the roll.” The officer never looked closely at the card.
Inside the courtroom, Lina sat calmly with the Journalists Syndicate’s memorandum in one hand and a book she was reading from. Beside her sat Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and the journalist and politician Khaled Dawoud, with some lawyers and supporters who had found some way into the room. Lina smiled, and the smile gave everyone the feeling that all would be well. The solidarity energy ran in reverse, from her to the rest of the room.
Then the usher’s voice rang out, “Court!”, and the session began. The room fell silent. The judge came in wearing his red sash, and a prosecutor took his seat. Before it started, the lawyers Hassan Al-Azhary, Nabeh Elganadi, Mahienour El-Massry and Mohamed El-Baqer had expected the judge to give Lina’s defense a few days to review the file.
The first thunderbolt fell near midday. The court president, Judge Mohamed Mubarak, turned down the defense’s request for a week to read the case file and prepare their arguments. He offered two hours instead, until the end of the first session, which he thought plenty for what he called a “simple case” of running a website without a license, one that didn’t call for an adjournment. The defense team held its ground.
The judge went on to the other cases on the roll, then adjourned the session and withdrew with the prosecutor to the judges’ chambers. Soon the usher came out and ordered everyone out of the courtroom except Lina and her lawyers. For a few minutes there was silence from inside, until the sound of the lawyers chanting carried through to those outside: “Void! Void! Void!” Then the door opened. Everyone came out. Except Lina.
Where was Lina? The lawyers told us the judge had appointed a lawyer for her whom she didn’t know, and failed to put her objection to him on the court’s record; the man filed no motion and said not a word. Then the judge imposed the maximum penalty: a fine of 3 million pounds, closure of the site, and Lina held until the fine was paid. Hossam Bahgat described how security rushed Lina and “lifted her right off the floor!” The shock stayed on his face all day.
The ATM scramble
Outside, lawyer Hassan Al-Azhary gave the supporters the court’s decision, and told the journalists: “We will certainly appeal the order.” “It’s an order, not a verdict.” “We’ll try to negotiate paying the fine in installments.” “And yes, the order means the site must be closed.” Then the lawyers went back in to negotiate.
Everyone went back to their places on the sidewalk by the waste dump, trying to take in what had just happened, until the lawyers returned with word that the installment plan was approved. “We’ll pay a million now and the rest in two days.” “No, a million and a half.” The defense offered a check for the amount. The court refused and demanded the money in “cash or Visa.” The scramble begins. One well-off supporter covers most of the first installment, and the rest comes in donations from whoever is standing there. “This card has 35,000 on it.” “You can take twenty from here.”
The first installment is in, but the lawyers come back with fresh news: the court insists on the full amount, and we have to find the rest. Those on their feet hurry to the cash machines in the nearby Seven Stars mall; supporters turn up with whatever they’ve managed to withdraw or collect. The question goes round: how much have we got? Some machines won’t dispense. Others have broken down. “A hundred thousand to go,” one woman says.
Another asks, “How much did you take out? Twenty? And you? Ten?” A phone rings; she answers it, then comes back with news. “So-and-so’s arrived with twenty.” “She said so-and-so’s on her way.” The tension climbs with the fear that the payments window will close, since it is nearly four in the afternoon, until the news comes at last: the full amount is there, and they are counting it now.
The hours dragged. Around seven, the crowd of supporters and journalists began to thin, sure by now that Lina’s release was only a matter of time, and those who stayed drifted back to the café across from the court, leaving the sidewalk by the waste dump behind.
Soon after, an officer told Lina’s defense team that two people who knew her personally should bring a car to the gate and collect her, just the two of them, or she would be taken to the police station and released from there.
The light was dim as the sun went down, and several of the lamp posts in front of the court were out. Even so, we could make out Lina getting into the car at the gate, then turning to wave to the supporters still standing with Mada Masr, and the car pulled away into the distance.
Later we learned that while the paperwork was being finished, she was told of an in absentia sentence of one year in prison in an earlier case, which she has since contested. And so, a very long, very shocking day ended with one more twist.