The 15-member Supreme Press Council (SPC) held its first meeting on Sunday after a reshuffle ordered by interim President Adli Mansour on 28 August that reshuffled the SPC in accordance with the amended press law approved in July by the cabinet. Gamal Fahmi, the Press Syndicate's undersecretary, said that the syndicate had nominated more than five members to the SPC. “The syndicate nominated its representatives as well as public figures, while the presidency nominated university professors and legal experts,” Fahmi told Al-Ahram Weekly. The new SPC consists of 15 members, instead of the former 50. It is headed by former syndicate chairman Galal Aref and includes current syndicate head Diaa Rashwan, leftist writer Salah Eissa, dean of mass communication at Cairo University Hassan Mekkawi, Cairo University criminal law professor Mahmoud Kebeish and constitutional expert Nour Farahat. It also includes the head of the Egyptian Writers Union Mohamed Salmawy, Dar Al-Maarif board member Osama Ayoub and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Rose El-Youssef Osama Salama, along with other prominent journalists and public figures. The first meeting of the new SPC was a procedural session limited to the election of the body. During their first meeting, SPC members chose Aref to be the council's head, while Eissa and Mekkawi were appointed first and second undersecretary, respectively, and Ayoub became the secretary-general. Although the syndicate had pressed during the current drafting process of the new constitution for the replacement of the SPC by a National Press Council and a National Broadcast Council, it agreed in principle to the formation of the new SPC due to the need for a body that would run the affairs of the state-owned press in the absence of the Shura Council. “The syndicate agreed on the council's formation since it would be an interim one until the amendments to the articles of the suspended constitution have been drafted,” Fahmi said. The council will assume the authority previously exercised by the now-dissolved Shura Council. It is anticipated that it will remain in place until the end of the transitional period. After the endorsement of the country's new constitution and the holding of parliamentary elections, a new law is expected to regulate the press. “The first mission awaiting the new SPC is to rectify the wrong policies adopted by the Shura Council regarding the status of the state-owned press institutions during the one-year rule of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Aref said. Eissa said that the control exercised by the Shura Council over the national newspapers had turned them into subsidiaries of the former ruling parties, whether the National Democratic Party, which ruled the country under ousted former president Hosni Mubarak, or the Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party. “We proposed an article in the amended constitution regarding the status of the state-run newspapers, recommending that they should be independent of both the legislative and the executive. In other words, the national newspapers should be run as holding companies,” Eissa told the Weekly, stressing that journalists at the state-run newspapers did not want to be in the hands of any political party. The appointment of the chairmen of the boards and chief editors of the national newspapers, together with half of the boards themselves and a number of members of the newspapers' general councils, formerly lay with the Shura Council. This authority has now been given to the SPC. “The first mission for the legal members of the SPC is to emphasise the freedom and independence of the press,” Farahat said. “There are problems which need to be tackled by legal means, among them the relationship of the state-owned newspapers to the executive and legislative branches of government.” Articles in the 2012 constitution related to the independence of the national newspapers were merely “open-ended sentences”, Farahat said, adding that these articles allowed for the closure of newspapers and their confiscation by court ruling. “We oppose some of these constitutional articles, especially those allowing for the imposition of sanctions on the newspapers in states of war or in emergency periods, as these articles restrict the freedom of the press,” Farahat said. Aref said that the new SPC would try to meet demands made by journalists, including the abolition of prison sentences for publishing offences and the possible banning or closure of newspapers. Meanwhile, the closure of the Islamist satellite TV channels in the wake of the 30 June Revolution was criticised as constituting a violation of press freedoms. Interim President Mansour vowed to end the imprisonment of journalists for publishing offences during his meeting with a syndicate delegation in July. The maximum penalty for such offences would henceforth be a fine, he said. Numerous cases were filed against journalists when deposed former president Mohamed Morsi was in power. Last March, the syndicate issued a statement accusing Morsi of launching a campaign of “intimidation and incitement” against journalists.
