EGYPT'S PRESIDENT EL SISI ORDERS STUDY OF POSSIBLE PARDON FOR ACTIVIST ALAA ABDEL FATTAH

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah El Sisi on Tuesday ordered officials to study the possibility of pardons for Egyptian-British activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah and six other convicts.

The order follows a petition launched on Monday by Egypt's National Council for Human Rights that called for the President to pardon seven prisoners "in view of the critical family circumstances faced by their relatives".

The council issued a statement on Tuesday that said Mr El Sisi had directed relevant authorities to study the petition.

Abdel Fattah, 43, began a hunger strike on March 1 and moved to a partial hunger strike in late July after his name was taken off Egypt's terrorism list. His mother had ended her hunger strike earlier in the month.

He has been detained several times under different governments for lobbying for more civil rights on social media and in public. He was a central figure in Egypt’s 2011 uprising that forced former president Hosni Mubarak to step down.

An influential blogger, Abdel Fattah frequently challenged the authorities' crackdown on dissent after the military removed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 amid widespread protests against his rule. Mr El Sisi was the army chief and defence minister at the time.

Abdel Fattah was sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 for participating in an illegal street protest. He was released in March 2019 but arrested again in September that year and remained in pretrial detention until last December when he received a five-year prison term for “spreading false news”.

A computer programmer by profession, he hails from a family of political activists, lawyers and writers. His late father was one of Egypt's most tireless rights lawyers, his sisters are also political activists, and his aunt is the award-winning novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

2025-09-09T09:43:46Z