British activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah released from prison after receiving pardon
Mr Abd El-Fattah was imprisoned almost all of the past 12 years.
British pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah was released from prison early on Tuesday after being granted a presidential pardon, according to his campaign.
He and five other prisoners had been pardoned on Monday after the National Council for Human Rights acted on behalf of their families and urged president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to consider the prisoners’ situation on “health and humanitarian grounds”.
His campaign said in a statement that Mr Abd El-Fattah was released from Wadi Natrun Prison after being imprisoned almost all of the past 12 years and was now in his home in Cairo.
“An exceptionally kind day. Alaa is free,” his sister Mona Seif wrote on social media site X along with a picture of her brother smiling with his mother Laila Soueif and sister Sanaa Seif.
He was arrested in 2014 for participating in an unauthorised protest and allegedly assaulting a police officer and briefly released in 2019 before he was detained again later that year during a security crackdown that followed rare anti-government protests in Egypt.
Mr Abd El-Fattah was one of the most prominent Egyptian activists in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising and his detention became emblematic of the fraying of Egypt’s democracy.
He took part in the 2011 uprising that toppled autocratic former president Hosni Mubarak, and later was active in protests against human rights abuses and military trials of civilians.
When his release date came up in September 2024, authorities refused to count his time in pre-trial detention and ordered him held until January 3, 2027.
Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while he was celebrating Mr Abd El-Fattah’s pardon, thousands of others remain behind bars because of their public views.
“Hopefully his release will act as a watershed moment,” providing the government with the opportunity “to end the wrongful detention of thousands of peaceful critics,” Mr Magdi said in the statement.
The pardon came after Mr El-Sisi’s office said he had ordered a review of a petition submitted from an independent rights group earlier this month. The petition had seven names, and the status of the seventh person was not immediately clear.
The National Council for Human Rights said it welcomed the pardon, describing it as underscoring “a growing commitment to reinforcing the principles of swift justice and upholding fundamental rights and freedoms”.
Mr Abd El-Fattah’s family waged a desperate campaign to pressure Britain — where Mr Abd El-Fattah obtained citizenship in 2021 through his UK-born mother — to help secure his freedom and take him in.
When Egypt failed to release Mr Abd El-Fattah last September, his mother, Soueif, began her own hunger strike in Britain, but became seriously ill and ended the strike in July.
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper welcomed the pardon and expressed gratitude to Mr El-Sisi in a post on X.
An influential blogger, Mr Abd El-Fattah hails from a family of political activists, lawyers and writers. His late father was one of Egypt’s most tireless rights lawyers, his sisters — British citizens as well — are also political activists, and his aunt is the award-winning novelist Ahdaf Soueif.
Mr Abd El-Fattah’s most dramatic hunger strike came in 2022, as Egypt hosted a UN climate summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. That strike ended when Mr Abd El-Fattah lost consciousness and was revived with fluids.
Leaders of Britain, France and Germany said they sought Mr Abd El-Fattah’s release in private talks with Mr El-Sisi during the climate conference.
The circumstances surrounding the latest appeal for Mr Abd El-Fattah’s release were different than previous ones, the activist’s lawyer, Khaled Ali, told the Associated Press earlier this month — in part because of his mother’s hunger strike, which added a “humane” element to the petition.
Mr Ali said earlier this month that a court order had removed his client’s name from the government’s “terrorism list”, which would allow him to travel out of the country once he is freed – though the campaign said in a statement it was unclear if Mr Abd El-Fattah could travel yet to see his son.
It was not immediately known if the activist would leave Egypt, but Mr Ali said that his client has a desire to keep his Egyptian citizenship and live in Egypt.
“I hope this pardon creates an opportunity to find a serious solution for prolonged pretrial detentions and sentences against politicians and activists just because they had an opinion,” Mr Ali said at the time.
