RSF joins call for UK Foreign Minister to secure Alaa Abdel Fattah’s release during trip to Egypt
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has joined more than a dozen human rights organisations in calling on UK Foreign Minister David Lammy to prioritise securing British citizen Alaa Abdel Fattah’s release from prison during his upcoming visit to Egypt.
Lammy, who has described Abdel Fattah’s continued detention as his “number one issue”, is expected to be in Cairo for meetings on Thursday 23 January. Abdel Fattah, a dual British-Egyptian national, is a blogger and writer who has spent most of the last ten years in jail. His mother, Laila Soueif, has been on hunger strike for more than 110 days in a desperate bid to get the UK government to act decisively for her son.
“The Foreign Minister has said that Alaa Abdel Fattah is his priority, and now is the time to prove it. He should not return to London until he has secured Alaa’s release, and an end to his family’s ordeal. Egypt must not be allowed to show such brazen disregard for the rule of law, or to make a mockery of the UK Government’s avowed commitment to press freedom and human rights. Lammy must use his trip to Cairo to bring Alaa home.”
In a letter to Lammy dated 20 January, signatories including Amnesty International UK, Human Rights Watch and English PEN also called for him to do all he can to visit Abdel Fattah in Wadi Al-Natrun prison. Abdel Fattah has so far been denied consular access, in violation of the UK’s rights under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations
Abdel Fattah completed his most recent five-year sentence on 29 September 2024, but the Egyptian authorities have refused to recognise the time he served in pre-trial detention, in defiance of international legal norms and Egypt’s own penal code.
Lammy has described Abdel Fattah as a “courageous voice for democracy” and harshly criticised the previous UK government’s weakness on the case. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi about the case on 26 December and again on 8 January, and also sent his National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell to Egypt on 2 January. It is not clear, though, whether Downing Street has had any meaningful response to its efforts.
Egypt was ranked 170 out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index due to the frequency of censorship, police raids, arrests, shutdowns, sham trials, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions. There are currently 20 journalists imprisoned in Egypt, including Abdel Fattah.
