CAIRO: A state council court adjourned on Saturday the case brought against 51 Egyptian websites belonging to human rights organizations and outspoken bloggers by Alexandria head judge Abdel Fattah Mourad on the grounds that they “harm Egypt’s reputation.
The court is to deliver its decision in the case on Dec. 8, reported the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRInfo).
Websites that risk shut down include those of several prominent rights groups including the Hisham Mubarak Center, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Egyptian Association for Combating Torture, and HRInfo itself. Numerous antigovernment weblogs such as Arabawy.org and Salamander have also earned spots on the judge’s black list of Egyptian websites deemed harmful to the nation.
According to HRInfo Director Gamal Eid, Mourad demands the shut down of the sites because they “uncovered the plagiarism he committed against HRInfo.
It was in April this year that HRInfo appealed to the public prosecutor to open an investigation into Mourad on accusations of violating the organization’s intellectual property rights.
HRInfo maintains that Mourad copied several pages from a report issued by the organization on Internet blogging in the Arab world and then used it in his own book Scientific and Legal Principles of Blogs on the Internet without quoting references.
Shortly after the Egyptian blogs started bringing HRInfo’s accusations to light, Mourad filed a lawsuit against tens of blogs and websites.
“The Judge is the one who is mistaken, not the websites. He is the one who violated the copyrights of HRInfo, Wael Abbas, moderator of the blog Misr Digital told Daily News Egypt.
In response to the court’s announcement, HRInfo stated that “it has been a decisive week for freedom of expression in Egypt.
