A group of Nobel laureates have written to the British prime minister Keir Starmer urging him to intervene to help free the imprisoned writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

Twelve laureates including JM Coetzee, Annie Ernaux, Kazuo Ishiguro and Olga Tokarczuk have signed the letter.

“We write to you as long concerned supporters of the imprisoned writer, Alaa Abd el-Fattah,” the letter begins. “We write to you because time is running out.” »»

My sister is 68, and today is her 60th day on hunger strike. This is her latest battle against injustice, and she knows it may be her last. »»

It was my honor to write the foreword to Alaa’s mind-altering book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021). Having spent considerable time immersed in his writing, I would also have been happy to spend this short speech tonight praising Alaa’s work — pulling out the insights and sentences that are now permanent parts of my mental architecture. >>>>

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely. >>>>

As Alaa enters nearly 11 years behind bars and prison construction in Egypt booms under El-Sisi’s rule, how does an attachment to legalised frameworks in prisoner release campaigns fail to capture the imperial violence underpinning Egypt’s prisons? Alternatively, what can abolitionist theory offer our movements by way of explaining the economic motives behind Egypt’s prison expansion? And what does Alaa teach us about ‘stretching’ abolition into non-Western geographies – where colonialism is not past but present? >>>>

Ms Soueif, who was born in London and lives in Cairo, said: “I will not eat again until Alaa is released.

“Every day that he is in prison beyond his sentence is a grave injustice, even beyond the terrible injustice that he has been imprisoned at all.

“Once again the Egyptian authorities have violated their own laws to persecute my son. At this stage I consider this a kidnapping as well as unlawful detention.

>>>>

The first time I saw Alaa in person was in late 2019, in a cellblock at Cairo’s maximum-security Tora prison. He looked frailer than he did in the Tahrir-era pictures I had seen. His face was slightly hollowed, glasses askew, his hair cut short, and his white prison uniform hung loosely. >>>>

“I don’t know how my spirit will accept that we are entering a new form of illegal incarceration,” the imprisoned activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah wrote in a letter received by his mother today during her visit with him at the Wadi al-Natroun prison complex located on a desert highway between Cairo and Alexandria.

>>>>

When COP27 – hosted by Egypt last November – presented a perfect opportunity to put sufficient diplomatic pressure on the Egyptian authorities and secure Alaa’s release, the UK Government failed miserably to take it.

Almost seven months on, Alaa remains cruelly behind bars, and Sunak’s attempts to ‘resolve’ the case have vanished. The Prime Minister simply cannot let this injustice slide.

>>>>

Alaa Abdel-Fattah ended his hunger strike in November last year after his situation had drawn high-profile international attention and there had been serious concern for his life. But very little has changed since, and the Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist remains in jail. >>>>

ALAA ABD EL-FATTAH had not heard music in three years. The writer, technologist, and activist, an essential voice in the revolution that began in Egypt in 2011, had been arrested in September 2019 on trumped-up charges. Ever since, el-Fattah, a British Egyptian national, had been asking for an mp3 player. >>>>

No one knows what happened to the lost climate letter. All that is known is this: Alaa Abd El Fattah, arguably Egypt’s highest profile political prisoner, wrote it while on a hunger strike in his Cairo prison cell last month. It was, he explained later, “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan.” He was concerned about the epic floods that displaced 33 million people at their peak, and what that cataclysm foretold about climate hardships and paltry state responses to come. >>>>

On Sunday, the first day of COP27, the U.N. climate change conference in Egypt, Alaa Abd El Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist and writer whose seven-month hunger strike began as an effort to force the Egyptian authorities to permit British consular access to him in prison, escalated his protest by refusing water and all liquids. >>>>

Documentary by Vice News at COP27 that spent time with Alaa’s sister as she campaigned for his release >>>>

When I finally tracked down Sanaa Seif at cop27, she had just blanked an old friend in the corridor. This was becoming a reflex, she explained, as she pulled me into a breathless dash through the conference centre hosting the climate talks, sending papers, pastry crumbs and apologies tumbling in our wake. “A schoolmate I haven’t seen for many years waved across the room at me during breakfast,” she said, swerving to avoid what appeared to be the entire Malian national delegation heading the other way. “I just ignored it. I don’t want to put anyone else in danger.” >>>>

It’s an open question as to how much the United Nations’ annual climate conferences still matter—the young activist Greta Thunberg memorably summed up last year’s meeting, in Glasgow, as so much “blah blah blah.” But there’s at least one thing that this year’s session—scheduled for November, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt—should be able to accomplish right now, and that is to free Alaa Abd El-Fattah, one of the most prominent of the country’s reported thousands of political prisoners. >>>>

CAIRO — When world leaders arrive in Egypt for the U.N. Climate Change Conference next week, they will have to dance around a subject that the government here would prefer not to discuss: human rights.

Egyptian officials face mounting scrutiny over how the country can host the prestigious conference while thousands of people rights groups say were unjustly imprisoned remain behind bars — including Alaa Abdel Fattah, 40, a British Egyptian computer programmer and activist who has been on a partial hunger strike for more than 200 days. >>>>

“You Have Not Yet Been Defeated” is the title of an anthology of writing by an imprisoned blogger and activist in Egypt, Alaa Abdel Fattah. He has been detained by every Egyptian leader during his lifetime. His family announced he began a hunger strike April 2 to protest harsh conditions in prison. He has not yet been defeated, and must not be. >>>>

In a totalitarian system where even ideas are punishable with imprisonment, this collection of essays from one of Egypt’s most high-profile political prisoners is like an oasis in a desolate landscape. >>>>

Alaa is an incisive thinker, with a wide-ranging intellect, as much at home critiquing Silicon Valley technology as he is talking about constitutional reform. And through all his writing run the themes that animated Egypt’s 2011 revolution: freedom and justice. >>>>

Unquestionably a Good Thing is Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (Fitzcarraldo). That the Egyptian activist is writing from a cell reminds us of the fragility of our remaining freedoms; that his arguments continue to be self-interrogating, engaging and complex is a rebuke to the comfortable moral certainties of social media. >>>>

Ultimately, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a call for action. Alaa writes with an unflinching political urgency, addressing the reader directly to ask what they are doing to rise against injustice. To him, the activist is not a spectacular cult figure or gatekeeper, but rather the average person that uses their agency and influence to organise within their respective contexts. He reminds each person living outside prison walls that they have an important role in the fight to make the world a more just and compassionate place. >>>>

To read it is to be impressed, over and over, with the writ- er’s combination of honesty, originality, and humility. It is to be amazed by how often Abd el-Fattah is right, not in the sense that he knows what to do, but in the sense that he so often sees the truth of each messy, polarizing, often hopeless juncture. His writing is sharp and funny, passionate and vulnerable, straining generously to find something useful to say. >>>>

“Fix your own democracy,” Abd el-Fattah encourages us, from his cell; Egypt’s rulers attempt to isolate, fragment and conceal resistance because it needs a global ecosystem to flourish. What can any one person do with a legacy of pain, struggle and courage? There are no easy solutions here, but You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a heartbreaking, hopeful answer.” >>>>

These essays are necessary reading for anyone who wishes to understand the last decade of Egyptian politics. >>>>

Alaa, who grew up in a family of activists, has been thinking and writing about human rights and democracy since he was a teenager. But he has also written about subjects such as the dangers of capitalism and powerful tech companies’ impact on citizens—all part of his effort to envision what a sustainable and equitable society, built on the strong foundations of a shared democratic culture, might look like. >>>>

Alaa remains incarcerated. The injustice of his condition is condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Office, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, as well as by many other organizations. He is one of over 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. >>>>

The World's Marco Werman spoke with Sanaa Seif, his sister, about his hunger strike and the new book he's released from prison, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.”  >>>>

Alaa’s words are telegraphic and incandescent as he reflects upon tyranny, technology, and despair, as well as the failures of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, defeat without shame, where a dark optimism could be found. The book is a crucial testament to a history that is still alive. >>>>

Alaa Abd el-Fattah's 'You Have Not Yet Been Defeated' is both an archive and a blueprint: an archive of a revolution deferred, and a blueprint for bringing the world that it dreamt of into existence. That it succeeds so brilliantly at holding the two together is perhaps the surest sign that its author – and its readers – “have not yet been defeated." >>>>

From his cells, Alaa has done a monumental service to people anywhere concerned with the destiny of democracy, as he sketches the contours of political change at its most urgent. >>>>