Alaa Abd El Fattah’s mother starts hunger strike to protest his extended imprisonment, condemns British ‘complicity’

Laila Soueif, mother of long-imprisoned writer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, began a hunger strike on Monday to protest authorities refusal to release her son at the end of his five-year imprisonment, according to a statement made by the family a copy of which Mada Masr reviewed a copy.

Soueif told Mada Masr that during the hunger strike she will only consume water and rehydration solutions from “the first minute of September 30,” the day she was looking forward to seeing her son walk free after the end of a five-year prison sentence for spreading false news.

Defense lawyer Khaled Ali, who represents Abd El Fattah, said on Sunday that prosecutors had refused to consider the two years Abd El Fattah spent in remand detention before he was referred to trial as part of his five-year sentence. 

Sanaa and Mona Seif, the sisters of Abd El Fattah, who is a British-Egyptian citizen, are set to meet British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Wednesday to urge him to act to secure their brother’s release, the statement said.

The hunger strike is a protest against what Soueif described today as “the Egyptian authorities’ crime” against her son, whom she now considers to be kidnapped and detained outside the law, as well as against “complicity” of British authorities in his continued imprisonment.

The family’s statement listed a number of actions that the British Foreign Office can take to pressure Cairo, including imposing conditions on the US$400 million Cairo will receive from the British government, updating travel advice for British citizens to reflect that the UK cannot guarantee consular access to its nationals if they are detained, and using its influence at the International Monetary Fund to pressure Cairo during loan negotiations.

In statements to The Guardian, Sanaa previously expressed hope that Egyptian authorities would respond to the new government in London if the latter pushed for her brother’s release after he completed his sentence, pointing out that Lammy is in a position to achieve this goal if he wanted.

During his time in the British shadow cabinet, Lammy consistently advocated for Abd El Fattah’s release, going so far as to join a protest organized by the family in 2022 outside the Foreign Office, and accusing the previous UK government of failing British citizens and not taking the necessary steps to protect them. He even called on the previous Conservative government to leverage its trade partnership with Egypt, worth 4 billion British pounds, to pressure for Abd El Fattah’s release, and called for the Egyptian ambassador’s right of access to the British government to be revoked, given that British consular access to Abd El Fattah has not been permitted.

However, since taking office, Lammy has ignored the case, according to the Seif family’s statement, which said they have been unable to meet him for more than two months. “He must have 15 minutes to spare to meet with a family he knows very well. I saw a photo last night of David Lammy meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister,” Sanaa told Radio Times on Thursday.

Abd El Fattah’s other sister, Mona, told The Standard that she feared Cairo was exploiting the current conflict in the Middle East to its advantage in discussions with London, noting that relations between the two countries have recently been flourishing, explaining the sidelining of Abd El Fattah case. 

“Every day is a really, really hurtful and painful burden on Alaa and our family. And you can’t ask a prisoner to suck it up and, you know, give the government time,” she said.

Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawky rejected the family’s request to count the two years of detention that Abd El Fattah spent in prison as part of his five-year prison sentence, an illegal action on Shawky’s part. This means Abd El Fattah will continue to be imprisoned until January 3, 2027, amid fears, expressed by Amnesty International, that the authorities will then resort to other tactics to extend his imprisonment further. 

“Egyptian authorities have a dreadful track record of indefinitely detaining political dissidents by concocting new reasons to keep them locked up,” the organization’s statement said.

Since his involvement in the January 2011 revolution, Abd El Fattah has spent most of the past decade in prison on political charges. His long imprisonment began with him being convicted of illegally protesting in the case that became known as the “Shura Council Incidents,” for which he was sentenced to five years in prison that he completed on March 27, 2019, and was followed by five years of precautionary measures that included spending every night in a police station.

He was soon re-arrested in 2019, after he republished an activist’s post about the death of a prisoner under torture in the Aqrab Prison. He was charged with the now commonly deployed offense of joining a terrorist group and spreading false news, and held in remand detention for more than two years. He was ultimately referred to trial on only false news charges, and sent to the court, which sentenced him to five years. 

But before his expected release date, his lawyers discovered that the state had begun to count the sentence from the date of the verdict was issued, ignoring the provisions of the law that require the remand detention period to be counted as part of the sentence.