CAIRO: The Supreme Administrative Court on Monday adjourned hearing the appeal of a case brought by judge Abdel Fattah Mourad seeking the blocking of 51 websites.
Lawyer Rawda Ahmed from the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) – whose website is included on the list of 51 – told Daily News Egypt that the case was adjourned pending the court’s receipt and examination of a specialist report.
Ahmed said that the court is scheduled to announce the date of the next hearing Tuesday.
Mourad, the head of the Alexandria Appeals Court, initiated the case against the list of 51 human rights organizations and bloggers last year. He accused the websites of “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation, and demanded that they be blocked.
Earlier in 2007, ANHRI director Gamal Eid brought a case against Mourad accusing him of plagiarizing more than 50 pages of an ANHRI report on the internet in the Arab world.
“Dr Abdel Fattah Mourad, judge and head of Alexandria Appeal Court, recently published a book entitled ‘Scientific and Legal Principles of Blogs,’ which includes more than 50 pages copied from HRinfo’s [now known as ANHRI] report entitled ‘Implacable Adversaries: Arab Governments and the Internet,’ without reference to sources, as dictated by Intellectual Property Protection Act no. 82/2002, HRInfo stated in a press release issued last year.
Mourad’s case against the 51 websites was thrown out by the Administrative Court at the end of December 2007.
In its reasoning, the Administrative Court emphasized the importance of freedom of expression and said that websites cannot be blocked as long as their content does not compromise public order or offend public morals.
