Three members of Sutton Amnesty attended an event at the Human Rights Action Centre which celebrated Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s book, ‘You Have Not Yet Been Defeated’. We had the opportunity to listen to readings from his book and to participate in a Q&A session with Mona Seif, Alaa’s sister.

For newcomers to the Sutton Group, we have been working on Alaa’s case since 2021, with our hard working Barbara managing our efforts.  Alaa remains imprisoned in Egypt on charges of ‘spreading false news’ after a grossly unfair trial. Alaa has been called the ‘voice of a generation’ for his writings about democracy and his vision for a democratic future in Egypt and beyond. He has been repeatedly arrested during the last decade and has now been in prison for over five years. Last month he received the devastating news that he was not going to be released at the end of September 2024 because the two years spent in pre-detention did not count towards his five year sentence. As a result, he now has a release date during 2027 at the earliest.

The book mentioned above is a poignant selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews since 2011. Alaa has recently won this year’s prestigious Writer of Courage award. More details are available here:

https://www.englishpen.org/posts/campaigns/arundhati-roy-shares-pen-pin…

A copy of the book was purchased for the Group. As many reviews observe, it is not a book to read for comfort, more for education and reflection. It does give us a valuable opportunity to understand and empathise with the person we adopted in our group.

Alaa writes of the importance of never losing hope, ‘with faith in a better future despite knowing that tomorrow still holds a lot of pain’. While success is not certain, ‘all that is asked of us is that we don’t stop fighting for what’s right’. He also outlines a harrowing account of life in detention.

During the Q&A session, Mona highlighted the family’s frustration with the U.K. government’s continued lack of action in (i) raising this issue with their counterparts in Egypt and (ii) using leverage on the back of the U.K.’s lucrative trade with Egypt . The family remains hopeful that Foreign Secretary David Lammy will remember his earlier commitments in this regard. At the same time, Mona is frustrated that ‘governments are governments’ and individual issues can easily become lost.
 
The family is now dealing with the considerable pressure of Alaa’s mother (Laila Soueif) going on hunger strike in response to her son’s continued detention. In her words:

‘My son had hoped that the British government would secure his release. If they do not I fear he will spend his entire life in prison. So I am going on hunger strike for him, and I would rather die than allow Alaa to continue to be mistreated in this way.’

What can we do?

Mona stressed that the family is exhausted and issued a heartfelt plea for others to continue to raise Alaa’s profile, ‘please take on the case as yours‘ and remember that, as far as the Egyptian government  is concerned, ‘our superpower is to push, pressurise and embarrass’.

Group members will have received an urgent action from our Secretary prior to the last meeting, together with a follow up email on 24 October. If you have a moment, it would be great if you could do these.

There is a separate and ongoing Amnesty petition on behalf of British citizens detained abroad which also covers Alaa. In addition other organisations, such as FreeAlaa, are promoting this case and if you are interested you can also follow their reports and actions  (see for  example https://freealaa.net/take-action and https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2024/09/british-egyptian-activist-ala… )