Egypt’s Cabinet has asked the Justice Ministry to draft Penal Code amendments to sharply raise fines for “rumors” and false news, a move the Journalists Syndicate chief warned could stifle the press and undermine constitutional safeguards.
The government says tougher financial penalties are needed to deter false reporting that threatens “social and economic security,” and has ordered ministries to set up units to monitor and counter what it describes as rumors. But Journalists Syndicate head Khaled Elbalshy said the constitution instead requires laws guaranteeing access to information and banning jail terms in publishing cases, warning that higher fines risk becoming “a backdoor to imprisonment” and forcing media outlets to close.
The Cabinet said it had commissioned the Justice Ministry to prepare amendments increasing fines for crimes related to “rumors” and false news “in a way that achieves general deterrence, preserves the stability of public security and protects the public image of the Egyptian state.” It added that current penalties, including those in Article 380 of the Penal Code, were not sufficient to deter such offenses.
Ministers also agreed to speed up completion and issuance of a draft law regulating the circulation of official data and information. The Cabinet tasked the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology with designing and implementing a training program for staff in state bodies “with the aim of enhancing their technical capacity to track rumors and verify their accuracy.”
During the meeting, the Cabinet said all ministries should establish “early monitoring units” to respond to and refute rumors at their source “so they can be pre-empted from spreading.”
In a Facebook post, Elbalshy said the Cabinet “has chosen the wrong way to deal with rumors, starting with harsher fines, even though the Egyptian constitution sets out a clear route: passing laws that give effect to the constitutional provisions on freedom of information and that ban jail terms in publishing cases.” He added that only after such laws are in place should there be any debate on raising fines, and then only “on the condition that higher fines do not become a backdoor to imprisonment through ever-tougher ‘deterrent’ penalties or end up forcing newspapers to close.”
Elbalshy argued that the starting point for confronting rumors “is to make information available through a law that enables journalists and citizens to freely access information, to provide mechanisms that ensure its availability, and to oblige official sources to provide it when requested.” Making accurate information available and providing ways to correct errors would “close the door to the spread of rumors,” he said.
He said the constitution offers “a comprehensive prescription for dealing with rumors” by requiring that information be made available, and its free circulation regulated in a way that both allows and obliges those who share information to correct inaccuracies or face punishment. The constitution also lifts restrictions on journalistic work by banning jail sentences in publishing cases, the Journalists Syndicate head added.
“Once that framework is in place, we can then reconsider some of the current fines so they act as a deterrent without becoming a new route to imprisonment or—as I have said—a tool for killing the truth or besieging those who carry it, by shutting down the outlets that publish it because they cannot afford fines that have been inflated in the name of deterrence,” Elbalshy wrote.
He underlined that “the punishment for false news is to correct it, and that excessive penalties are not the way to confront rumors or false news.” Harsh sanctions, he warned, may instead help such stories spread, as “people who share information hold back from publishing it for fear of punishment,” opening “the back doors wide, without any controls, to actors operating outside the reach of the law.”
Elbalshy said the message from the authorities should have been to start immediately on drafting complementary laws to Articles 68 and 71 of the constitution, to remove restrictions on journalistic and media work and complete a legislative framework that guarantees freedom of publication and expression. In that case, he said, Egypt “might not need to toughen any penalties at all, or it could be done without turning them into a tool for further restrictions,” adding that government and media should work together “to build a free media system and laws that make information available as the quickest way to confront rumors and false, misleading news.”
Egypt ranks sixth in the world in terms of the number of imprisoned journalists over the past year, with 17 journalists behind bars, according to a tally by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reporters Without Borders has said that “Egypt continues to be one of the world’s biggest jailers of journalists. The hopes for freedom that accompanied the 2011 revolution now seem distant.”
