The Arabist

The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

Online Censorship Suit

Hossam has linked to Judge Abd al-Fattah's lawsuit here. It's riddled with factual errors. More on that later. It's still not clear if this is going anywhere, but as commenters on Issandr's original post on the topic noted, we have early warning in this case, and we should take advantage of it. A list of the URLs the judge is asking the government to censor follows. Since a court has yet to rule on whether these are libelous, archiving them in Egypt may be risky. So people outside of Egypt who might be interested in hosting mirrors, here are the urls. They include the sites of some of the most prominent human rights organizations in Egypt:

http://www.hrinfo.net/
The Web site of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (hrinfo)

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/hmcl
The page of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Legal Aid, hosted on hrinfo's site

http://www.afteegypt.org
Web site of the Nur Center

http://wwwshamsannews.net/newsdetails.asp?id=402http://www.eipr.org
The Web site of the Egyptian Inititative for Personal Rights

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/hmlc
A typo leads to a 404 page, but it's named in the suit. The correct URL for the Hisham Mubarak Center is named above.

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/elmarsd/
The Urban Center [lit. "Observatory"] for Human Rights

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/eojl/
The Egyptian Center for Justice and Law

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/nadeem/
The page for the Nadim Center for Victims of Violence, hosted on hrinfo

http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/eaat
The Egyptian Association Against Torture

http://elsaeedi.katib.org/node/48#comment
A page from a blog concerned with human rights issues

http://harakamasria.org/node/9062#comment-7416
From Kifaya's Web site

http://gharbeia.net/ar/judgebookreview
Blog that has campaigned for democracy, human rights, and respect for the environment

http://www.alghad.org.eg
Purportedly the Web site of the Ghad Party's newspaper. Incidentally, this URL was inaccessible from Egypt March 14 using the ISP LINKdotNET.

http://www.gn4me.com/nahda
The Egyptian Renaissance site

http://www.gn4me.com
The Good News company's site, named as the owner of The Egyptian Renaissance, above.

http://www.alnoor.se/othernews.asp?year=200
Web site of the Nur Center

http://www.shamsannews.net/newsdetails.asp?id=402
Shmasan News

http://www.wna-news.com/inanews/news.php?item3699.6
Web site of the Iraqi News Agency

http://mohamed.katib.org/node/34
Blog post

http://taranim.wordpress.com/2006/02/22/kareemyagod/#comments
Blog post

http://bentmasreya.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_14.html
Blog post

http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/net2004/egypt.shtml
The Egypt chapter of HRinfo's 2004 report on Internet censorship in the Middle East

http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/re2006/re06-2.shtml
HRinfo report on April-May 2006 crackdown

http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/re2006/#egypt
HRinfo report on Bahrain, Tunisia, and Egypt

http://elsaeedi.katib.org/node/
Blog

http://gharbeia.net/ar/judgeBOOKReview#comment
Blog post