Activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s family urges presidential pardon

The family of jailed British-Egyptian political activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah filed earlier this week a petition for a presidential pardon for his release, as his 68-year-old mother, Laila Soueif, has vowed to continue her over two-month-long hunger strike in protest of her son’s alleged “unlawful incineration,” according to lawyer Khaled Ali.

A number of public figures submitted the petition, signed by Abdel-Fattah’s two sisters, Mona and Sanaa Seif, local news outlets reported, without providing further details. 

The petition, the third over the past years, came amid mounting concerns over Soueif’s health condition, who has been on an ongoing hunger strike since 30 September.

No official comment has yet been made by the presidency until the publication time. 

On 29 September, the Egyptian prosecutor-general rejected a petition by Abdel-Fattah’s family and lawyer to count the two years he had spent in pre-trial detention as part of his sentence. In doing so, his imprisonment is expected to end in January 2027 instead. At that time, his mother said in statements that she considered her son to be “kidnapped by the authorities.”

Egyptian criminal procedures law dictates that the duration of a detainee’s detention before trial is deducted from the sentence as long as s/he has not been convicted of any other offences during this time.

‘She gets hungry, so he can live’

On Thursday, Mona Seif, a biologist and a prominent activist herself, released a Facebook reel, addressing sceptics who doubted the credibility of her mother’s ongoing hunger strike.

According to Seif, the distressed mother has refrained from consuming any kind of solid food that could provide her system with calories, drinking only hot fluids with no added sugar, and using oral rehydration solutions.      

Soueif is a mathematics professor and renowned activist, known for her decades-long fight for the independence of Egypt’s public academic institutions.

Meanwhile, dozens of activists, intellectuals and artists have in recent weeks been expressing solidarity with Soueif by launching a 24-hour symbolic hunger strike as they shared an online petition that demanded her son’s release.

They posted video clips of themselves and posted online petitions on social media platforms. The hashtags: ‘she gets hungry, so he can live,’ ‘free Alaa,’ and ‘free them all’ have gone viral.

The pro-democracy and rights campaigner was sentenced to five years for “spreading false news” by sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.

Abdel-Fattah, 42, also an author, a software developer and a blogger, was a key figure in the 2011 revolution that toppled Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak. He was granted British citizenship in 2022 through his British-born mother.

Rights groups estimate that about 60,000 political prisoners remain incarcerated in Egypt, many have suffered torture, abuse, and neglect of basic needs.