Alaa ABD EL-FATTAH
Alaa Abd El-Fattah, an award-winning writer and Honorary Member of English PEN, remained arbitrarily imprisoned at the end of the year, despite fully serving an unjust five-year prison sentence in connection with his exercise of his right to free expression. He remains in poor health.
Arrested in September 2019, he was sentenced to five years in prison in 2021 on fabricated charges including ‘joining an illegal organisation’, ‘spreading false news,’ and ‘misusing social media’ after a grossly unfair trial before the Emergency State Security Court. Abd El-Fattah has been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment and held in deplorable prison conditions, as well as prohibited from accessing books and newspapers, all of which has impacted his health. In 2022, Abd El-Fattah underwent a lengthy hunger strike in protest at his conditions of detention and to call attention to the human rights situation in Egypt (see Case Lists 2019 to 2023/2024). This is his second period of imprisonment; he previously served an unjust five year sentence for participating in a peaceful protest in 2013.
On 29 September 2024, Abd El-Fattah completed his five-year sentence; however, Egyptian authorities continue to arbitrarily detain him beyond his prison term. According to his family, the Egyptian authorities refuse to recognise the more than two years that Abd El-Fattah spent in pre-trial detention, pushing his release date to January 2027. Egyptian authorities also continue to deny Abd El-Fattah’s access to a lawyer and British consular visits. His mother, academic and human rights activist Laila Soueif, started an open-ended hunger strike on 29 September to protest Abd El-Fattah’s arbitrary imprisonment.
In April and November 2024, PEN International, along with a coalition of human rights organisations, sent a letter to the UN WGAD on behalf of Abd El-Fattah, urging the working group to announce its opinion on his detention. PEN International and English PEN joined Abd El-Fattah’s mother Laila Soueif in multiple demonstrations outside the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to urge the UK authorities to do more to secure his release.
Born on 18 November 1981, dual British-Egyptian national Alaa Abd El-Fattah was a crucial voice of the 2011-2012 Arab Spring uprisings, during which he documented human rights abuses and advocated for democracy. His book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2022, Seven Stories Press), which compiles some of his profoundly influential writings, has received widespread acclaim. He won the 2022 Electronic Frontier Foundation Award for Democratic Reform Advocacy and PEN Canada’s One Humanity Award in 2023. Abd El-Fattah was named the 2024 Writer of Courage by PEN Pinter Prize 2024 winner Arundhati Roy.