CAIRO: State-owned daily Rose El-Youssef was fined LE 50,000 by a South Cairo Court Tuesday in a defamation suit initiated by a leading member of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood group, ex-MP Gamal Heshmat.
The court ruled in favor of Heshamt for the moral and financial damages he faced due to the publishing of false information about him. It concluded that there was malice in the paper’s decision to publish the information and in its refusal to run a correction.
The former member of the People’s Assembly said that the article published by Rose El-Youssef was based on a phone interview with him on May 16, 2009. The defamatory report was inaccurate in phrasing his quotations as well as included wrong information.
“I took the issue to court when the chairman and the editor-in-chief refused to run a correction of the wrong information they published, Heshmat said in a statement acquired by Daily News Egypt.
His lawyer, Mokhtar Noah, filed an appeal, to be considered within the next few days, requesting an increase in the LE 50,000 fine, which they believe does not match the damages resulting from the defamatory article, Noah said.
Heshmat was denied permission to leave Egypt 12 times despite obtaining court orders allowing him to travel, the Brotherhood said on its website.
Known for being a government mouthpiece, Rose El-Youssef has been criticized for being a waste of public funds as its circulation rates have been steadily decreasing, according to official reports.
“Rose El-Youssef controls Egyptian media and the minister not because it is the most influential or has the highest circulation rates, but because it is the voice of the ruling NDP, said Gamal Eid, executive director of Arab Network for Human Rights Information.
Journalist and head of the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate Mohamed Abdel Quddous, whose grandmother Rose El-Youssef had founded a magazine by the same title in the first half of the 20th century, previously told the Daily News Egypt, “We are sorry that Rose El-Youssef has reached this state. It is no longer a forum for free expression and great journalism, nor does it represent the liberal ideology it followed when it was first established.
Daily News Egypt tried to reach Rose El-Youssef’s chief editor Abdallah Kamal, but requests for an interview about the verdict were turned down by his secretary.
