His Excellency President Hosni Mubarak

President of Egypt
Cairo, Egypt

12 October 2010

Your Excellency,

We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries, to express our serious concern at recent attacks on independent media, including the dismissal of Ibrahim Eissa, ahead of the forthcoming parliamentary and 2011 presidential elections.

According to reports, Mr Eissa, editor-in-chief and founder of the private daily Al-Dustour, was dismissed on 5 October within 24 hours of the transfer of Al-Dustour to new owners, including media mogul and opposition Al-Wafd party leader al-Sayyid al-Badawi. The new owners had given assurances before the sale that they would not interfere in the newspaper's editorial line. After his dismissal, Mr Eissa reportedly said that the paper's new owners had asked him not to publish an article written by Mohamed ElBaradei, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and leader of a political reform movement. Within hours of his refusal to remove Mr ElBaradei's article, Mr Eissa was relieved of his duties. Mr Al-Badawi claims that Mr Eissa's dismissal was related to a labour dispute.

Mr Eissa is the laureate of the 2008 Gebran Tueni Award, the annual prize from WAN-IFRA that honours an editor or publisher in the Arab region. Over Mr Eissa's career, 65 cases have been filed against him for allegedly violating Egypt's press law. In 2006, he was sentenced to one year in prison - later reduced to a fine - for publishing a story about the misuse of public funds. In 2008, he was sentenced to two months in prison for "publishing false information and rumours" about Your Excellency's health, an offence for which he later received a presidential pardon.

We are also concerned that Mr Eissa's dismissal appears be part of a larger pattern of intimidation of critical journalists ahead of the elections. Alaa al-Aswani and Hamdi Qandil, columnists at the private daily Al-Shuruq, stopped writing their columns last month after the newspaper's management warned them about external pressure to tone down their content. Television programme Al-Qahira Al-Yawm, presented by journalist Amr Adeeb, was also suspended on 25 September. Mr Adeeb claimed that the programme was halted for "political reasons".

We bring to your attention the Declaration of Table Mountain, endorsed at the 60th World Newspaper Congress and 14th Editors Forum in Cape Town in June 2007. The Declaration of Table Mountain, among other things, calls on African states to promote the highest standards of press freedom in furtherance of the principles proclaimed in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other protocols and to provide constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press.

We respectfully call on you to take all necessary steps to halt the campaign of intimidation and censorship of independent media so that the press is able to report free from government pressure. We ask you to ensure that in future your country fully respects international standards of press freedom.

We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Gavin O'Reilly
President
World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers

Xavier Vidal-Folch
President
World Editors Forum