Imprisoned Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah gains UK nationality, calls for British probe into abuses

Imprisoned blogger and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah has been granted citizenship in the United Kingdom and is on hunger strike at Cairo’s Tora Prison Complex to demand that British authorities be allowed to visit him and British lawyers intervene in his case, according to a Monday morning statement from Abd El Fattah’s sisters.

Abd El Fattah along with his sisters Mona and Sanaa Seif, the latter of whom has also spent time in detention, applied for British citizenship in 2019 through their mother, Laila Soueif, who was born in London in May 1965, and were recently granted UK nationality, said the statement.

Beginning a hunger strike on the first day of Ramadan, Abd El Fattah is demanding that an Egyptian judge be assigned to investigate complaints he has already submitted to judicial authorities documenting violations to which he has been subjected in detention during the past two and a half years.

As a new British citizen, Abd El Fattah is also requesting that the British Consulate be allowed to visit him in prison, and that he be allowed to communicate with the family’s lawyers in the UK to take “all possible action.” Both demands have been registered with the Public Prosecution in Cairo. 

“And so, Alaa is asking for urgent action from both Egypt and Britain’s judicial institutions; and we join him in his call,” the sisters’ statement said. 

Abd El Fattah, who has been imprisoned multiple times since 2013, was most recently arrested in 2019 from a Giza police station where he was required to spend the night as part of probationary measures entailed in an earlier sentence he served on protest charges. 

When Alaa arrived at Tora, he was stripped, blindfolded, beaten and threatened by a National Security Agency officer named in the family’s Monday statement as Ahmed Fekry. 

Abd El Fattah was subsequently held in remand detention without trial for two years, the maximum period legally permissible for only the most serious of crimes. For the duration of his imprisonment since 2019 he has been “kept in a cell without sunlight, with no books, no exercise,” said the family on Monday.

“His visitations have been cut to one family member, for 20 minutes a month, through glass, with not a moment of privacy or contact, the statement read.”

In December, Abd El Fattah was sentenced to five years in prison. During the trial, neither the prosecution nor the defense stated their case, according to the family statement. Lawyers told Mada Masr at the time that their requests to review copies of the case file were denied. The sentence was handed down in an emergency state security emergency court and later ratified, meaning that there is no legal route to appeal the ruling.

His sister previously told Mada Masr that Abd El Fattah had only learned during his trial that he was being charged for resharing a tweet about a prisoner who died in summer 2019 as a result of ill-treatment by the same officer, Ahmed Fekry, in detention in Maximum Security Wing 2 of Tora Prison Complex.

“Alaa has been under Fekri’s complete control” since his arrest in 2019, according to the Monday statement, which notes that even visits with his lawyer take place Fekri’s supervision, which they say led Abd El Fattah to request that his young son stop visiting him at the prison. 

“Many prisoners suffer even worse conditions than Alaa’s - and he has been witness to serious crimes committed against them,” said his family, noting that both Abd El Fattah and the family have submitted dozens of complaints with the Public Prosecution about a range of violations constantly perpetrated inside the prison.

The statement recounts an example in which Abd El Fattah overhead electricity being used to torture someone in a cell adjacent to his own, submitted a complaint and was questioned by investigating authorities. Afterward, the statement reads, “Ahmed Fekry entered the ward with a phalanx of guards, and started beating another inmate, forcing Alaa to listen as he screamed, “I never asked you to submit a complaint on my behalf.”