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The mom of a jailed British-Egyptian activist has not had a meal for shut to a month – a hunger strike that she hopes will lead to her son’s release earlier than she starves to demise.
Laila Soueif, a 68-year-old maths professor born in London however who now lives in Cairo, is in the UK to name for Alaa Abdel Fattah’s release.
Fattah, 42, is one of Egypt’s most distinguished pro-democracy voices and has spent a lot of the final decade in jail. In 2021, he was charged with spreading false information for sharing a Facebook publish about torture in Egypt, having already spent greater than two years in pretrial detention. He had additionally already served 5 years on comparable expenses between 2014 and 2019. Human rights teams, together with Amnesty International, have decried the costs and referred to as his trials a sham.
His mom has been on hunger strike since a day after Fattah’s second five-year sentence ended on 29 September with out his release.The Egyptian authorities has justified preserving Mr Fattah in jail by claiming his pre-trial detention doesn’t rely in direction of his time served.
“I hope I won’t die in this attempt,” says Soueif throughout a sit down with The Independent, her daughter Sanaa Seif and Fattah’s cousin, Omar Robert Hamilton.
“I don’t particularly want to leave my children with the memory of a martyred mother,” she says, speaking about current on water, rehydration salts, sugarless tea or espresso, and cigarettes. She provides that she is feeling advantageous, “but I know the other part is coming”, a reference to when her ravenous physique will begin to devour her muscle tissue for power. Her daughter winces subsequent to her as she speaks.
Soueif will get to see Fattah, whose 13-year-old son, Khaled, lives in Brighton, for 20 minutes as soon as a month. She says Fattah stays as constructive as he can in jail however refuses to discuss in regards to the future.
“If you try to talk to Alaa about the future, he refuses to engage in that,” she says. “He says things like: ‘You might as well plan Khaled’s life as an orphan. There is no point in planning for anything else.’”
Soueif and her household had been hopeful that the international secretary, David Lammy, would give you the option to get Fattah free, because the politician had been an outspoken advocate for the activist’s release whereas in the shadow cupboard. He was on document six instances calling for the activist’s release between 2021 and turning into international secretary, urging earlier Conservative governments to do extra to guarantee Fattah’s freedom.
But since Lammy has entered Whitehall, the household say they’ve been upset by his strategy.
“We thought things would be different [when he came into office], that we would have a partnership,” says Hamilton. “Instead, we have continued to be treated as someone to be kept on the outside.”
Soueif says she understands that Mr Lammy has so much in his in-tray however urges him to a minimum of “pick up the phone” to her.
Asked what she made of Mr Lammy now, she laughs sardonically. “We have this joke in Arabic: ‘You are not you when you are a minister’,” she says.
Lammy met with Fattah’s sisters Sanaa and Mona Seif earlier this month, days after they accused him of “ignoring” them since coming to workplace.
During the assembly, he promised to hold advocating for his or her brother however failed to point out that he had mentioned the chance of a British-Egyptian funding convention throughout a gathering with his counterpart from Cairo in direction of the top of September. That data solely turned public after the Egyptian presidential council introduced the chance of a convention on Facebook.
“They say nothing is going on but then, all of sudden, we see that there is a trade summit,” says Seif, visibly annoyed.
“This just makes it more dangerous for Alaa,” says Hamtilon. “Because [Egypt] now understands that [the UK] is just gonna raise [Fattah’s case] but nothing else is going to happen.”
In a response questions from The Independent about Fattah’s imprisonment, the Foreign Office stated they “continued to raise” the activist’s case with the Egyptian authorities. They referenced conferences between Lammy and his Egyptian counterpart, Badr Abdelatty, however didn’t point out a future bilateral summit.
“Our priority remains securing consular access to Fattah and his release,” a sokesperson stated. “We continue to raise his case at the highest levels of the Egyptian government.”
Soueif says this politicking and diplomacy appears solely to be delaying her son’s release. That is why, she says, she has determined to go on a hunger strike.
“He isn’t going to get out at this point,” she says. “So, I decided to do this to add a sense of urgency to the situation.”
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