B

Baroness Whitaker (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 4 June 2025

Debate

Alaa Abd el-Fattah

Contribution

My Lords, I stood with the daughter of Dr Soueif outside St Thomas’s yesterday. There were a lot of journalists there. The call was mainly because of the extreme urgency of the situation and the fact that it appears to be President Sisi’s own personal obsession to keep the young man in prison. Really, our contacts should be not only at the diplomatic level, but with our Prime Minister to the President, and with the Prime Ministers and the Presidents of our allies, such as President Macron, who also has a relationship with the Egyptian Government. Is it not imperative to find out what the real reason is for keeping Alaa in prison—is it his influence on the young people of Egypt?—so that the right trigger can be used to persuade President Sisi to let him out before his mother dies, which is possibly a matter of days?

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