UK – The Guardian, Oct. 11, 2025
The campaigner, who spent more than a decade in an Egyptian ‘vortex of incarceration’, wants to join his son in the UK while he reflects on the fight for freedom
The British-Egyptian human rights activist and writer, released from more than a decade in continuous detention in Cairo, has said he wants to come to the UK to be with his autistic 14-year-old son.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah said he feared his mother might have died on hunger strike during the 12 years he spent in what he described as a “vortex of incarceration”.
In an interview from Cairo, Abd el-Fattah also said he needed a pause in his human rights campaigning to give himself time to heal, adding he no longer believed prison was a necessary rite of passage on the route to freedom.
Smiling and joking in a Steve Biko T-shirt, he said he felt surprisingly well but needed time to find himself after so long either in solitary confinement or isolated in jail.
About the British government’s efforts to secure his release, he said simply: “We did manage to get me out but we did not manage to get a consular visit. That still does not make sense to me. But that might be on the previous government. This one might have inherited the situation.”
He also thanked those in the UK who had campaigned for his release and given strength to his own family, lightly referencing Margaret Thatcher’s claim that society did not exist in the UK. “It does exist and my family has experienced it,” he said.
