Prominent Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdelfatah has taken a further step in his hunger strike for his release and has stopped drinking water to coincide with the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP7) in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, his family has announced.
«My brother just drank his last glass of water in prison. Please keep the story alive, it’s not over. He can be saved,» said his sister and also activist Sanaa Seif through her account on the social network Twitter.
For her part, Mona Seif, also an activist and Abdelfatá’s sister, has stressed that «Alaa has won this round.» «No matter how it ends, he will be free from the horror of (Egyptian President Abdelfatá) Al Sisi’s prisons.» «It will be us who will suffer a great loss, but the whole world, including the governments of Egypt and the UK, even if they don’t see it now,» he has warned.
The 40-year-old activist has been ingesting only 100 calories for more than 200 days to demand that Egyptian authorities allow him consular access to the UK. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised to «address at the highest levels» Abdelfatah’s release and denounced his «unacceptable treatment» in a letter sent to Sanaa Seif.
For her part, the secretary general of the non-governmental organization Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, met with the activist’s mother, Laila Suef, in Cairo on Sunday. «Mother courage. Inspiring. Touching. Human rights activist. Her son is imprisoned activist Alaa Abdelfata- He stopped drinking water after 219 on hunger strike. Al Sisi has only a few days to save a man’s life,» she said, before demanding his release.
Abdelfatah, a leading Egyptian blogger and one of the main figures in the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011 as part of the ‘Arab Spring’, has been in prison for nine years and in 2021 was sentenced to another five-year jail term for «spreading false news», charges that various NGOs have branded as false.
Al Sisi came to power through a coup in July 2013 that he led after a series of mass demonstrations against the then president, Islamist Mohamed Mursi, the country’s first democratically elected leader, who died in 2019 during a court hearing against him following his arrest after the uprising.
The leader has promoted a broad campaign of repression and persecution against opponents, both liberal groups and Islamist organizations – going so far as to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization – an initiative that human rights groups have denounced as the most serious in recent times.
