Alaa

Alaa Abd El Fattah

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade.

He has been in prison for almost 10 years.

Full Biography

The persecution of Alaa Abd El Fattah is a recurring theme in Egypt. He was jailed under the Mubarak regime for 45 days and again by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in 2011. He remained in jail for almost two months, missing the birth of his son, Khalid. He also faced trumped up charges designed to intimidate protest under the Morsi government in 2013 along with popular satirist Bassem Youssef.

Alaa first came to prominence for co-founding, along with his wife Manal Hassan, the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa and Omraneya, the first Arabic blog aggregators that did not restrict inclusion based on the content of the blog. In 2005 the Manalaa blog won the Special Reporters Without Borders Award in Deutsche Welle's Best of Blogs competition. Alaa was a central figure within the blogging movement of the early 2000s, then a vanguard of free speech and radical discourse that would become one of the catalysts of the 2011 revolution.

During the revolution Alaa rose to international prominence through the combination of his online presence, on-the-ground activism, incisive analysis and uncompromising politics. Elevated to almost symbolic status as representing the new generation of revolutionary youth Alaa was at the vanguard of several political currents within the revolution, and became a principal target of the old regime's attempts to re-assert dominance.

He was arrested in November 2013, three months after Abdel-Fattah el Sisi's coup d'état and after a trial that lasted over a year, was sentenced to five years imprisonment, charged with the organisation of a protest.

He was released briefly in 2019, then re-arrested.

One of Alaa’s lawyers, Mohamed el-Baqer was arrested by State Security while representing Alaa. El-Baqer was charged in the same case as Alaa - and in December 2021 were both sentenced to five years in prison. When it became clear that there was going to be no way out of Sisi’s prisons, his family began inquiries about him acquiring British citizenship - Alaa’s mother was born in London in 1956.

In 2021 Alaa acquired British citizenship. Since then, it has been his right to a consular visit by representatives of the British embassy - a right that has so far been refused by Egypt. Alaa went on hunger strike for over 200 days, demanding his right to consular access. During the COP27 Climate Conference, world leaders flew in to Egypt and called for his release, including Rishi Sunak, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and Jake Sullivan speaking for the White House; the story was covered by media worldwide and extensively inside Egypt - but Alaa remains in prison to this day.