On 2 April Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British citizen being held, tortured and denied medical care in a maximum security prison in Egypt, launched an open ended hunger-strike to demand the right to a visit from the British consul. There is obviously a serious risk he will die.
Though Abd el-Fattah is a UK citizen, the right-wing press here has studiously ignored his hunger strike, presumably in deference to the UK government’s extensive economic and “security” ties with Egypt. You can read a detailed report of what is happening to him in the Independent.
A secular democracy activist aged 40, Abd el-Fattah has been in and out of prison under every Egyptian president in his lifetime – first decades-long ruler Hosni Mubarak, then Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and now Mubarak mark 2 Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. (The names of the dictator and his prisoner are spelt the same in Arabic, but usually rendered differently in transliteration.)
For an overview of how the Egyptian revolution beginning in 2011 was defeated, see here.
To give a sense of Sisi’s regime, former president Morsi died after collapsing during a new trial in 2019, six years after he was first overthrown and sentenced to prison. Imagine the situation facing the estimated 60,000 less high-profile political prisoners in the country’s jails.
We write about Alaa Abd el-Fattah to demand freedom for all jailed activists for democracy and workers’ rights – and to indict “our” government as well as Egypt’s.
Reports make clear that the Tories do not want to make any fuss about this case – a pattern seen more than once with British citizens jailed and abused in other countries in the last decade. As well as empowering themselves to strip British citizenship more easily, they are making it clear they do not regard it as counting for too much in a crunch.
• More here