Egypt Is Refusing to Release its Most Prominent Political Prisoner, an Icon of the 2011 Revolution
"This is unbearable," Alaa Abd El-Fattah wrote in a letter from prison today.
“I don’t know how my spirit will accept that we are entering a new form of illegal incarceration,” the imprisoned activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah wrote in a letter received by his mother today during her visit with him at the Wadi al-Natroun prison complex located on a desert highway between Cairo and Alexandria.
“I already can’t absorb that the regime actually sentenced me twice to five years and I actually served the ten years. So I don’t understand why anyone would want me to spend even more time in prison. The only explanation is that there’s someone out there who understands very well that this is unbearable and who wants something to happen to me, or wants me to go back once more to a state of total despair. That’s if anyone’s paying attention to what’s happening to us in the first place in the midst of all the catastrophes happening around us.”
Alaa Abd El-Fattah, 42, is arguably Egypt’s most prominent political prisoner and has been behind bars almost continuously for over a decade. An icon of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, an engaged organizer and technologist, and a powerful writer and thinker, Alaa represents much of what the authorities in Egypt have sought to crush since millions took to the streets in a powerful mass mobilization that overthrew a 30-year autocrat.
His most recent period of detention began on September 28, 2019, when he was re-arrested following a brief period outside of prison after serving a five-year sentence. In December 2021, after over two years in pre-trial detention, Alaa was sentenced to another five years in prison on charges of spreading false news and undermining state security in a sham trial.
Under Egypt’s own Code of Criminal Procedure, time spent in pretrial detention counts towards any sentence, meaning he should have been released on September 29 of this year. Yet Egyptian authorities are determined to keep him behind bars for an additional two years at least. Earlier this month, his lawyer, Khaled Ali, was notified that Egyptian authorities are calculating the start of his five-year sentence from the date his sentence was ratified on January 3, 2022, not from the date of his arrest on September 28, 2019. In this scenario, Alaa will not be freed until January 2027, after having spent over seven years behind bars.
“It is clear to our family that the intention of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is to keep Alaa in prison as long as he is in power.”
Alaa’s mother, Laila Soueif, sent a letter to the Public Prosecutor this month calling on him to “take the necessary steps to correct this situation so that Alaa is released on the date when his sentence actually ends, on September 29, 2024.” Alaa’s lawyer, Khaled Ali, did the same. On September 26th, the family received an official reply rejecting the request.
“He finished his second five-year sentence and they are still not allowing him to be released and are creating another confrontation,” Alaa’s sister, Mona Seif, told Drop Site News. “It is clear to our family that the intention of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is to keep Alaa in prison as long as he is in power.”
On Monday, Alaa’s mother announced that she was going on hunger strike to protest her son’s continued imprisonment. “I consider Alaa unlawfully detained. I am going on full hunger strike until he is released. This is to protest the crime committed against him by the Egyptian authorities, and to protest the complicity of the British authorities,” she said in a statement. “I will not eat again until Alaa is released."
Unused Leverage
Last week, a coalition of 59 Egyptian and international civil society organizations published a joint letter expressing their “deep alarm” at the news Egyptian authorities plan to keep Alaa in prison until January 2027 and called on “Egypt’s international partners to urgently raise Alaa’s case with their counterparts, and to call for his immediate release, in line with Egyptian legal requirements.”
Alaa has British citizenship and his family has been increasingly critical of the British government for failing to help secure his release or even to gain consular access to him in prison, as is his legal right. Last week, Alaa’s sisters, Mona and Sanaa, held a press conference in London and criticized British Foreign Secretary David Lammy for not meeting with them about Alaa’s case since coming into office. Hours after the press conference concluded, they received word that Lammy would meet with them in a meeting scheduled for October 2.
The family has pointed to the contrast in Lammy’s public stance on Alaa’s case when he was in the opposition, before the Labour Party won in elections this summer. As the shadow foreign secretary, Lammy had championed Alaa as a “courageous voice for democracy” and was a vocal critic of the Tory government’s record. In a speech on the floor of the House of Commons in November 2022, Lammy said: "For too long the government’s diplomacy has been weak…What diplomatic price has Egypt paid for denying the right of consular access to a British citizen? And will the Minister make clear there will be serious diplomatic consequences if access is not granted immediately and Alaa is not released and reunited with his family?” Lammy also visited the family during their sit-in outside the Foreign Office in London, hosted Sanaa on his radio show, saying “we have a £4 billion trading partnership with Egypt—that is tremendous leverage.”
After the UK elections, “Alaa wrote to me in a letter and I made sure this reached David Lammy in a correspondence as well,” Mona told Drop Site. “He wrote ‘I’ve heard David Lammy is now officially the foreign secretary and I’m allowing myself to be hopeful. Please let him know.’”
Yet as Foreign Secretary, Lammy has been much less vocal about Alaa’s case and on September 25, he met with Egyptian foreign minister Badr Abdelatty, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York to “strengthen bilateral ties and promote economic growth and investment” between Britain and Egypt, according to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. In response to written questions from Drop Site, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) said Lammy did raise Alaa’s case with Abdelatty in that meeting. “Our priority remains securing consular access to Mr El-Fattah and his release. We continue to raise his case at the highest levels of the Egyptian Government,” an FCDO spokesperson said.
“They are following the exact same steps of the previous Tory government, which is that they are just making sure his case is raised whenever they have any official communication with their counterparts in Egypt. As far as we can tell, they have done nothing beyond this,” Mona said. “We know that David Lammy understands the case very well—he understands to the tiniest detail the level of violations Alaa has been exposed to. But also, of his own accord, he previously spoke about diplomatic tools within—at that point—the hands of the Tory government that could be used to ensure Alaa is safely released and to ensure his safe passage to the UK. We are expecting him just to do this, to fulfill his promises.”
While Egypt maintains strong ties with Britain, its principal ally is the United States. Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, with a total of $1.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing every year.
This month, the Biden administration for the first time opted to waive all human rights conditions on military aid to Egypt. Of the $1.3 billion, $225 million can be withheld if the U.S. government finds that Egypt has not taken “sustained and effective” steps to improve a range of rights and freedoms. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a national security waiver to override these concerns in recognition of Egypt's contributions to various U.S. national security priorities, including “to finalize a ceasefire agreement for Gaza, bring the hostages home, and surge humanitarian assistance for Palestinians in need,” a State Department spokesperson told Reuters. An additional $95 million of aid is specifically tied to demonstrating progress on the release of political prisoners. And even though the State Department’s most recent human rights report cites Alaa’s continued imprisonment, among others, as a case of arbitrary detention in contravention of international law, the Biden administration determined that Egypt has made “sufficient progress” to grant those funds, the spokesperson said.
It marked the first time the Biden administration released all $320 million in aid to Egypt conditioned on meeting certain human rights standards. It also stands in contrast to comments by Joe Biden in 2020 when he was running for office and vowed to end “blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator’”—in reference to a comment Trump reportedly made in describing Sisi.
A Decade Behind Bars
Alaa has been prosecuted or imprisoned by every Egyptian regime to rule in his lifetime and has been held behind bars for all but a few months for over a decade. He comes from a storied political family in Egypt. His father, the pioneering human rights lawyer, Ahmed Seif al-Islam, was jailed and tortured in the 1980s under President Hosni Mubarak. His mother, Laila Soueif, a well-known professor of mathematics at Cairo university, has been arrested several times for her activism. Both of his sisters, Mona and Sanaa, are prominent political activists. Sanaa has been imprisoned three times, spending a total of 3 years and 3 months behind bars.
“We know that with Alaa, it’s personal for Sisi, and also our family,” Mona said. “We've been kind of unofficially told as a family since 2020 that our case file is directly handled by the presidential office. Every time a new official from the UK side comes into office, it takes them a bit of time to figure out that this is different. This is personal.”
Alaa first emerged in the early 2000s as a computer programmer and blogger. He worked on technology localization—on the Arabization of terminology and translating user interfaces into Arabic. He and his wife ran one of the first Arabic blog aggregators, creating a platform that was a nexus of early online activism in Egypt.
His first arrest came in 2006 under the Mubarak regime, as he joined protests calling for the independence of the judiciary and was imprisoned for 45 days. When the revolution erupted in January 2011, Alaa moved back to Egypt from South Africa, where he had been living, to take part in the uprising. It was in this period that he rose to international prominence as an activist and public intellectual, emerging as a symbol of a new generation calling for change.
Following Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Alaa was jailed for nearly two months under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces—the military council that took over after Mubarak. While in prison, he missed the birth of his son, Khaled. Under the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, the member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was elected in 2012, Alaa faced an arrest warrant on trumped up charges. But it was under the rule of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that Alaa would be locked up longterm.
He was arrested in November 2013, three months after Sisi's coup d'état that brought him to power, and eventually sentenced to five years imprisonment on charges of organizing a protest. At a press conference in 2014, his father addressed his imprisoned son: "I wanted you to inherit a democratic society that guards your rights, my son, but instead I passed on the prison cell that held me, and now holds you." A few months later, his father died while both Alaa and Sanaa were behind bars.
After serving his five-year sentence, Alaa was released in early 2019. His sentence included another five years of “probation,” which meant that he had to turn himself in to his local police station every night where would be confined to a holding area from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. In September 2019, following relatively small but significant anti-government protests in Cairo and other cities, Alaa—who did not take part in the demonstrations—was arrested from the police station where he was spending the night, part of a massive arrest sweep with 4,000 people taken into custody across the country.
Alaa was beaten and tortured and eventually thrown into a dark cell in the maximum security wing of Torah prison, known as the “Scorpion,” with no books or reading material, no sunlight or fresh air, no exercise or time outside of his cell, no bedding, no pen and paper, and no clock. When Alaa’s lawyer Mohamed El-Baqer came to the prosecutor’s office to represent Alaa, he was arrested as well and thrown into the same maximum security prison. Alaa was held there in pretrial detention for two years, before he was put on trial in an Emergency State Security Court on charges of spreading false news for resharing a Facebook post about the torture of another prisoner who had died.
It was during this period that the family decided to embark on a process to obtain British citizenship for Alaa through his mother, who was born in London in 1956, in what they characterized in a statement at the time as a way out of his “impossible ordeal.”
In December 2021, he was sentenced to five years in prison in a trial decried by rights groups as “grossly unfair” and where the defense team was not even allowed access to the case file. A few months later, in April 2022, Alaa went on a hunger strike and his family announced he was a British citizen.
In November 2022, with his health already fragile after over 200 days on hunger strike, Alaa announced he would also stop drinking water, timed to coincide with the first day of the United Nations COP27 Climate Conference that Egypt was hosting and as world leaders and international civil society groups were arriving in Sharm El Sheikh.
Alaa’s case became the main story at the UN climate summit, making international headlines and shining a spotlight on the Egyptian government’s dismal human rights record. Amid the furor, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and the White House all publicly called for Alaa’s release. Five days into his water strike, Alaa collapsed in what he would later describe as a near-death experience. When he was revived by his cellmates, he decided not to resume the hunger strike.
Last year, a campaign by celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Olivia Coleman, and Carey Mulligan called for his release on Father’s Day. Alaa had not seen his son, Khaled, in years:
Amid the public outcry and global attention on Alaa’s case, he was eventually transferred out of the maximum security wing of Torah prison to the newly built Wadi al-Natroun prison complex where his conditions improved, eventually being allowed access to reading materials and some television, though his only exercise remains in an indoor hall, and he still has no access to fresh air or sunlight. This is where he remains locked up today, as he and his family continue a seemingly endless struggle for his release.
“You Have Not Yet Been Defeated”
In 2021, a collection of Alaa’s essays, letters, interviews, speeches, and social media posts over 10 years was published in a book titled You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. (I interviewed his sister, Sanaa, on stage in multiple U.S. cities during the book tour.) Much of what is in the book was written from inside prison. The following is an excerpt of one of his essays, written in Torah prison and published on March 27, 2017 in Mada Masr:
It’s over. We have been defeated, and meaning has been defeated with us. And just as we were – in every step – affected by the world and affecting it, so was our defeat both a symptom and a cause of a wider war on meaning, a war on the crime of people searching for a supranational public sphere where they might find intimacy, exchange, communication, even quarrels, that allow a common un- derstanding of reality, and multiple dreams of alternative worlds.
I’m in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us. So let us be an example, but of our own choosing. The war on meaning is not yet over in the rest of the world. Let us be an example, not a warning. Let’s communicate with the world again, not to send distress signals nor to cry over ruins or spilled milk, but to draw lessons, summarize experiences, and deepen observations, may it help those struggling in the post-truth era.
For me, I gained nothing from a decade of rage except for some simple lessons. Most importantly, that every step of debate and struggle in society is a chance. A chance to understand, a chance to network, a chance to dream, a chance to plan. Even if things appear simple and indisputable, and we aligned – early on – with one side of a struggle, or abstained early from it altogether, seizing such opportunities to pursue and produce meaning remains a necessity. Without it we will never get past defeat.
I’ve learned that the ruling regime is just an obstacle. The real challenges are international in nature, so seizing opportunities for debate becomes even more important when the conflict relates to issues that transcend national borders.
Finally, siding with the stronger party is generally not useful. The powerful need nothing from you but to parrot their propaganda. The weak often cause as much trouble as they suffer. Their arguments and discourses are often as brittle as their positions in society and their diminishing chances of safety and survival. Taking their side, therefore, even as an experiment, stimulates deeper reflection, investigation, analysis and imagination.
We were, then we were defeated, and meaning was defeated with us. But we have not perished yet, and meaning has not been killed. Perhaps our defeat was inevitable, but the current chaos that is sweeping the world will sooner or later give birth to a new world, a world that will – of course – be ruled and managed by the victors. But nothing will constrain the strong, nor shape the margins of freedom and justice, nor define spaces of beauty and possibilities for a common life except the weak, who clung to their defence of meaning, even after defeat.
Update: This story was updated on September 30, 2024, to include a statement from Alaa's mother Laila Soueif announcing her hunger strike.
The Egyptian government, like the Israeli government, is a brutal entity with absolutely no interest in protecting human rights. Neither one deserves to be supported by the US!
Alaa's words bring to mind something that Malcolm X said: That the USA does not have a 'Civil Rights" problem, but the whole world has a Human Rights problem.
Let us pray that he, and others suffering for the basic human right of self-expression around the world are free soon.