The Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, which is hosting this month’s COP27 climate summit, is a favourite venue for international gatherings. Wedged between the mountains and sea near the southern tip of Sinai with a tiny local population, it is easy to seal off and secure — a place where the country’s harsh realities can be kept at bay.
But as world leaders descended on the enclave for the climate gathering this week, Egypt’s human rights record — and in particular the plight of political dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah — has become the focus of intense attention, at times overshadowing the official business of the conference.
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Volker Turk, UN high commissioner for human rights, have all urged Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to release Abdel Fattah, who is serving a five-year jail sentence over a social media post.
But COP27 has also given Egypt’s human rights defenders, long vilified and banned from the country’s airwaves, an exceptional global platform. Enjoying the solidarity of international climate activists and with unfettered access to the press, the conference has created an unprecedented opportunity to make their voices heard.
This was underlined at a COP meeting on Tuesday, when Egyptian MP Amr Darwish criticised Sanaa Seif, Abdel Fattah’s sister who has been conducting a campaign in the UK on his behalf and who was addressing the audience. After he accused her of “summoning foreign powers to pressure Egypt”, he was ushered out by UN security officers — with the incident captured by dozens of journalists.
“A moment that should have been a showcase for Egyptian diplomacy has been overshadowed by all the focus on human rights,” said Michael Hanna, analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Sisi, a former general, overthrew his elected Islamist predecessor Mohamed Morsi, in a popularly backed coup in 2013. Since then he has presided over one of the harshest crackdowns on dissent in modern Egyptian history.
Tens of thousands of Islamists have been detained, with arrests extended to the regime’s secular critics. Protests are banned and rights groups, who are often accused of being paid agents of foreign governments, face severe restrictions.
Abdel Fattah, 40, came to public attention during the 2011 revolution that ended the authoritarian rule of veteran president Hosni Mubarak. He has been on a partial hunger strike since April and had warned he would stop taking water on Sunday, the day COP27 began. His family say he is convinced that the Egyptian authorities have no intention of ever freeing him and that his actions are driven by despair.
The dissident, who was granted British citizenship last year, has spent eight of the past 10 years in Egyptian jails. His family has had no news of him for days and fear he will die. “In a day or two, or three at the most, what Alaa’s going through will be over,” said his mother Laila Soueif. “If he is released, he will be free. If he dies, he will be free.”
The government has refused to acknowledge Abdel Fattah’s hunger strike or to allow a British consular visit. But Macron said this week that Sisi was committed to ensuring the activist’s health was “preserved” — comments that alarmed his family. “Are they force feeding my brother right now? Is he handcuffed on a bed and put on [intravenous drips] against his will?”, asked Seif. “If that’s the case, then he’s been plunged into an even worse nightmare than he was already in.”
Khaled Ali, Abdel Fattah’s lawyer, was told that he could visit his client on Thursday, but said that when he arrived at the prison, he had been refused entry.
Egyptian human rights groups have welcomed the publicity from COP27. Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said that when Egypt was selected as the summit’s host, “some people wanted to campaign against that, to choose a different location. We said ‘no, don’t do that’.
“We needed the attention, we needed the solidarity [and] we needed the comradeship,” he told a COP panel discussion on the country’s human rights situation.
Speakers at the panel warned that climate justice and human rights were interlinked. Bahgat said communities in Egypt threatened with environmental damage were too scared to talk to human rights groups or resist projects that threatened to have a negative impact on their lives.
It is also unclear how Cairo will react once COP27 has ended. “The risk of reprisals is very much there and that’s the decision that we had to make,” Bahgat said. “This is a huge opportunity: Egypt has been forgotten for the past few years because there is a degree of normalisation of repression and because it appears to be a stable country in the middle of a very unstable region.”
Meanwhile Abdel Fattah’s condition remains unknown. The attention at the summit has raised his profile but it is not certain it will lead to his release.
“The regime doesn’t want to be seen as succumbing to pressure,” said Hanna. “To the extent that there will be a course correction, it won’t be under the intense glare at COP. But if he dies, it will be a black eye for Egypt.”
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