[JURIST] Three Egyptian journalists and a lawyer have been charged with slandering a local election commission chief by alleging fraud in Egypt's November parliamentary election and publishing the names of two judges accused of rigging results in a runoff poll [JURIST report]. The journalists - two writing for the independent Sawt al-Umma weekly and a third being the editor of Afaq Arabiya, the journal of the Muslim Brotherhood - were charged a week after a judicial disciplinary panel acquitted one judge of whistleblowing and censured the second [JURIST report] for saying that fellow judges had conspired with a local election official to change the election results.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak [official profile] has denied that the government was behind the judicial prosecutions, describing them as a clash between the Judges Club [JURIST report] and the Supreme Judiciary Council. Aljazeera has more.