The gathering of world leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh for the Cop27 climate summit should have been an opportunity to showcase Egyptian diplomacy and regional leadership. Instead, almost overshadowing the vital discussions on global warming, the plight of a 40-year-old hunger-striking blogger has pushed Egypt’s appalling human rights record and its imprisonment of tens of thousands of opposition figures into centre stage.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian national and figurehead of the successful 2011 Egyptian uprisings against Hosni Mubarak, has been on a full hunger and thirst strike in jail since the beginning of the summit. His family and lawyer, who have been denied access to him, say he is close to death and worry the authorities may have started to force-feed him or use intravenous rehydration without his consent, a form of torture.
Abd El-Fattah has been imprisoned for most of the past nine years over peaceful activism and criticism of Egypt’s government. He was sentenced last year for “spreading false news” after sharing a social media post about torture. He was again detained recently by military prosecutors with 11 others after protesting at the deaths on October 9th of 25 people, mostly Coptic Christians. They were killed when military police tried to disperse thousands of protesters in Cairo angered at an attack by Muslim zealots against a church in the south of the country.
Human rights defenders who are calling for Abd El-Fattah’s immediate release also protest at the use of military rather than civil courts to try peaceful protesters under the pretext that they are terrorists. Their calls have been widely backed, among others by the UN commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, and world leaders from Joe Biden to Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz.
Shooting the breeze with trailblazer chemists
Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica
Tactical analysis: Clare got their numbers right, but it’s hard to measure sheer magic
Artist and shepherd Orla Barry: ‘Breeding animals is like making an artwork. You’re putting certain animals together’
Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former general who overthrew his elected Islamist predecessor Mohamed Morsi in a 2013 coup, has presided over one of the harshest crackdowns on dissent in modern Egyptian history.