Egypt’s new media laws: Rearranging legislative building blocks to maximize control | MadaMasr
▻https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/07/17/feature/politics/egypts-new-media-laws-rearranging-legislative-building-blocks-to-maximize-
Amid backlash from various stakeholders, Parliament passed three highly contested laws regulating Egypt’s media landscape by a two-thirds majority on Monday.
The laws, which took a convoluted and chaotic path through the legislature, set forth an array of regulations governing state and private media in Egypt that, when signed into law by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will effectively disband and reformulate three key media regulatory bodies which have operated in a murky legal environment since they were first created in 2016. The most powerful of these bodies, a the Supreme Media Regulatory Council, has been granted far-reaching powers that, combined with draconian rules governing media practices contained within the law, will allow authorities to further censor the press and restrict journalists’ work.
The new laws — parts of which have been criticized as unconstitutional — come in the context of a wider crackdown on the press in recent years with Egyptian authorities harassing and imprisoning journalists, blocking access to hundreds of websites, silencing oppositional voices and taking direct ownership of private media outlets.
The evolution of the controversial laws over the past two and a half years sheds some light on how authorities have worked to grant themselves greater jurisdiction to assert control over the media and to clamp down on overall freedom of expression in Egypt.