UK – Middle East Eye, August 16, 2024
Human rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech, democracy, and the protection of British citizens abroad are all principles that the UK government has firmly, noisily – and rightly – advocated for.
Why, then, is Alaa Abd el-Fattah – a British citizen – still rotting in an Egyptian cell?
Abd el-Fattah is perhaps Egypt‘s most famous political prisoner. He remains behind bars, serving a five-year sentence after a patently unfair trial on charges of “spreading false news undermining national security”.
His crime? He had re-shared a social media post about torture – hardly breaking news from a man who knows Egypt’s highly politicised judicial system from the inside, and where torture is both well-documented and widespread.
Abd el-Fattah’s current sentence is merely the latest in a long string of court cases that have kept him locked up for most of the past decade, and out of public discourse.
In October 2022, his two sisters staged a sit-outside the UK Foreign Office, urging then-Foreign Secretary James Cleverly to take action to secure his release. Today, with a new Labour government in office, Britain must act on this.
Politically motivated charges
Abd el-Fattah is no terrorist. Nor is he a felon, an insurgent, a liar or any other form of criminal.
He is in prison because he is one of the most articulate and intelligent pro-democracy activists in Egypt. Perhaps most tellingly, he is also hugely popular.
I know this because I was imprisoned with Abd el-Fattah for several months in 2014.
Two Egyptian colleagues and I had just been arrested on our own “fake news” and terrorism charges while we worked for Al Jazeera English. We had been covering the political crisis that continued to unfold in the wake of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011.
While my colleagues went to the notorious Scorpion Prison, I went to the Tora complex on the outskirts of Cairo.
It must have been particularly galling for Abd el-Fattah’s family to then see the US government go to extraordinary lengths to free three of their own from Russia this month in the most complicated prisoner exchange since the Cold War.
“We thought acquiring British citizenship could be a step on the road to Abd el-Fattah’s freedom,” his sister, Sanaa Seif, told The Guardian. “But it feels now like it has led to false hope, wasted energy and maybe even made things worse.”
Abd el-Fattah’s case is sadly part of a pattern. For most of the past decade, it seems as though the Conservative government had taken a cynically transactional approach to its foreign policy, telling the likes of Hong Kong, Iran and India that London wouldn’t get too noisy about Jimmy Lai, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe or Jagtar Singh Johal, respectively, as long as they maintained smooth political and trade relations.
Now, Britain’s new Labour government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has a chance to reset. It won the election at least partly by promising to reintroduce Britain to the world as a mature, serious power after years of Conservative mismanagement and decline.
