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.
Alaa, who has been in prison for most of the past nine years, was a popular, independent voice during the 2011 revolution, known for his fierce commitments to human rights and, above all, to bodily integrity. He insists that freedom from physical threat, violence and precarity must belong to everybody, be they a marginalized group, a political opponent or a prisoner, and that otherwise we are all in danger.
By refusing to even drink water during the climate summit — an event dedicated to thinking about our planet and its future — Alaa is intervening in this global conversation by staking his fragile, incarcerated body as the argument. From his prison cell, he is arguing what environmental activists have long known: Our planet and its future are not separate from us, from how we treat one another’s bodies, from whether we are able to live and think and speak safely and freely.
A few weeks earlier, Alaa’s sister Mona Seif visited him in prison. Like all his monthly visits, it was 20 minutes long and took place with a glass barrier between them. “I am going to die in here”, he told her. “You have to get over the notion that you’re going to rescue me. Focus on achieving the highest political price for my death”.
Alaa’s words point to a greater democratic concern beyond his self: that vaunted liberal democracies prioritize maintaining relations with dictatorships to safeguard strategic interests over the lives of their citizens — celebrated or ordinary — incarcerated and pushed to the brink of death by their authoritarian clients. Against these shortsighted politics, Alaa understands that our crises and our fates are interconnected.
I am married to his cousin. His family is still trying to save him and is making sure that his case has the widest possible impact. On Sunday, his youngest sister, Sanaa Seif, a 28-year-old activist and film editor, arrived in Sharm el Sheikh, the resort-town location of the summit, from London. She had spent two weeks sleeping in a tent outside the Foreign Office, pleading with the British government to do more for her brother. As she landed, she calculated that Alaa would be starting his 14th hour of refusing water.
Sanaa has already been imprisoned three times on charges related to her efforts to free her brother. After her most recent release from prison, last December, she committed her life to trying to get her brother out, meeting British and other government officials and rights groups and touring the United States to promote his book, which was published this year.
Though born and raised in Egypt, Alaa and his sisters have always been entitled to British citizenship because their mother, Laila Soueif, a mathematics professor and activist, was born in London. When it became clear after Alaa’s latest arrest that his chances of ever being able to live freely in Egypt had become impossible, he and his family claimed their second nationality as a way out for him, under a presidential decree that allows imprisoned foreigners to be repatriated if they renounce their Egyptian citizenship.
Facing serious economic crises and frequent bad press for violations and repression of Egyptians’ rights and freedoms, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is hosting the climate summit as an opportunity to reframe Egypt’s reputation as a locus of international diplomacy. Alaa’s hunger strike has ensured that Egypt’s human rights record is at the center of the summit, which concludes on Nov. 18.
On Tuesday, following Sanaa’s first news conference in Sharm el Sheikh, a member of Parliament from a party closely affiliated with President el-Sisi confronted her, accusing her of “inciting foreign governments” to put pressure on Egypt. He denied that her brother was a political prisoner, thwarted her attempt to translate his comments and had to be escorted out by U.N. security. Sanaa stepped out of the conference room to what a Washington Post journalist described as “the biggest press gaggle I’ve seen by far at COP27”.
Even ahead of the summit, Egypt’s well-documented repression raised questions of greenwashing among activists. Greta Thunberg declined to attend. But key figures in Egyptian civil society insisted that climate justice groups and activists should attend, for it could be an opportunity for theirs and other marginalized voices to re-enter the narrative.
And it is. Again on Tuesday, at an event organized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of a leading Egyptian human rights group, spoke about how climate justice work has become nearly impossible. The communities most vulnerable to dispossession by environmental-damage in Egypt are unable to organize themselves and afraid to speak out because rights work is criminalized. Mr. Bahgat has been barred from international travel for nearly seven years. Two years ago, Egyptian security forces arrested three of his organization’s senior-most staff.
It would have been impossible for this event to take place in Cairo and see people who have been doing critical human rights and political work in exhausting conditions talk about it in person, in public, as part of a global conversation.
Alaa’s radical decision to stop drinking water as diplomats, journalists, politicians, scholars and activists arrived in Sharm el Sheikh is galvanizing all of this. International government and grass-roots attendees have spoken out for him at the climate summit. Solidarity has poured in from everywhere: People in Egypt, New York, Palestine and around the world are writing, protesting, reading his work and going on hunger strikes in solidarity with him.
Because of his activism and his prolific writings, and because of how long he has been in prison, Alaa has become a symbol of the 2011 revolution, which Mr. el-Sisi, who came to power following a coup in 2013, has tried very hard to erase and prevent from recurring.
And yet, it seems that Mr. el-Sisi and his security state cannot stop people from embracing a renewed spirit of solidarity and calls for justice, which are reverberating throughout the climate summit. Alaa is on his sixth day of refusing water, after more than seven months without food. In response to pressure about his case, the Egyptian government has asked people to not get distracted, to focus on climate issues.
After months of denying that he was on a hunger strike, Egyptian authorities told the family that he is receiving medical intervention to prevent him from dying in prison. Alaa is not on strike because he wants to die; he is on strike because he wants to truly live. Any unwanted bodily intervention will only become a new front in his fight for his life.
In Sharm el Sheikh, the heads of the German, British and French governments said they raised Alaa’s case in their meetings with Mr. el-Sisi this week.
Alaa’s hunger strike has exposed the limitations of business-as-usual diplomacy and energized our capacities to create change. That goes for all of us: his loved ones and supporters, and the governments that are supposed to represent and protect him.
Yasmin El-Rifae is the author of Radius, a history of a feminist group that fought mass sexual assaults at Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring protests in Egypt.