Rishi Sunak has vowed to raise the fate of an Anglo-Egyptian detained at the COP27 weather summit, after fearing he was days away from dying.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard said Egypt had only a few hours to save the life of jailed dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah, who is now in the midst of a food and water strike.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak Sunak Sunak has written to Abdel Fattah’s family to say he will lift his imprisonment with the Egyptian government and respond until the end of the climate summit.
But human rights organizations and his circle of relatives said it would be too late by the end of the summit.
Egypt has not yet granted it British consular access, British and Egyptian officials are making plans for the meteorological summit, hosted in Britain last year.
Abdel-Fattah wrote to his mother last week: “On Sunday, November 6, I will drink my last glass of water. What follows is unknown. I fight for my freedom. . . and for the victims of a regime that cannot manage its crises other than through oppression. I am inundated with your love and longing for your company.
Computer programmer and Abdel-Fattah is well known in Egypt as a giant figure in the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s former despot.
The father of a child is recently serving five years in prison for “spreading false news” for sharing a social media post about torture. He received British citizenship from his mother last year while incarcerated in a desert prison two hours from Cairo and has spent much of the bars beyond the decade. Human rights organizations said the allegations were false.
“If you don’t want to end a death that you have and that you may have avoided, you want to act now,” Callamard told a news conference in the capital, Cairo.
Questions have been raised about the UK’s appointments with Egypt’s brutal regime and how this could have an effect on Abdel Fattah’s case.
The UK is one of the largest investors in Egypt, with an estimated total of £50 billion and £2 billion operating in the Egyptian market.
Biden’s management has to withhold some of the aid from Egypt’s military on human rights grounds, but the UK has not yet backed down.
Timothy Kaldas, senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told the Mirror: “There is no explanation as to why the Egyptian government gives you something because you asked them to, it has to be accompanied by pressure. If they don’t. “There’s a cost, why would they make a concession?”
Amnesty also said on Sunday it had documented a new wave of government repression. According to the group’s figures, 766 Egyptian political prisoners were released before the conference, Callamard said. He added that more than 1500 people have been arrested since April, adding more than 150 in the last two weeks alone.
John Casson, foreign policy adviser to the prime minister from 2010 to 2014 and ambassador to Egypt from 2014 to 2018, wrote in The Times: “When Rishi Sunak’s plane takes off from Sharm, it will cross the sky over the criminal where one of the British servicemen bravest are dying. If Abdel Fattah is still in prison that day, he will die. Rishi Sunak has to bring him back.
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