Egyptian president pardons prominent activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah after he spent years behind bars

Egypt’s president has pardoned prominent British-Egyptian national Alaa Abdel-Fattah, who has been imprisoned for the better part of the past decade after his involvement in the 2011 uprising.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi issued the pardon to the 43-year-old activist who has become one of the country’s most prominent political prisoners. Five others were also pardoned.

“The Egyptian president issues a pardon for the remainder of the prison sentence for a number of convicted persons, after taking the constitutional and legal procedures in this regard,” Al-Qahera News, which is linked to Egypt’s state intelligence services, reported.

The United Nations had repeatedly called for his immediate release and called his detention arbitrary. The British government had also raised Abdel-Fattah’s case with Egyptian authorities, including during talks between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Sisi.

He was initially sentenced to five years in prison in 2014 and released in early 2019, but was then re-arrested just months after being freed, and sentenced to five more years in prison.

Monday’s pardon comes just days after Sisi ordered relevant authorities to study a petition submitted by the state-affiliated National Council for Human Rights to pardon a number of individuals, including Abdel-Fattah.

It also followed a decision by a Cairo criminal court to remove Abdel-Fattah from the country’s terrorism list, ruling that recent investigations showed no evidence linking him to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

The decision also comes as Abdel-Fattah’s mother, who is also an activist and an academic, recently ended a 10-month hunger strike demanding her son’s release.

Abdel-Fattah himself has been on hunger strike since the start of September, following a partial strike that began in March in solidarity with his mother.