John McDonnell

You got me on that one, Madam Deputy Speaker. Hands up. I will hand myself in later. Our former Prime Minister the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) wrote to Alaa’s family before travelling to Egypt. He said that “the government is deeply committed to doing everything we can to resolve Alaa's case as soon as possible”. Despite that commitment, two years on from COP, Alaa’s family have nothing to show for the UK Government’s efforts to secure his release. If this new arbitrary extension of Alaa’s sentence is allowed to pass without intervention from the British authorities, his family fear, as many of us do, that he will never be released. They have cause to believe that as the Egyptian Government have repeatedly engaged in a practice they call “case recycling”, which is when new cases are brought against prisoners approaching the end of their sentence. According to human rights organisations such as the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, in 2023 at least 251 defendants were rotated to new cases. In 2022, another 620 defendants were treated in the same way. Alaa’s family began to lose faith in the previous Government, with Ministers seemingly unwilling to take any action on his case beyond simply raising it with their Egyptian counterparts. While that was going on, we witnessed the Government seeking ever-closer economic ties with the Egyptian Government. The election of a Labour Government gave Alaa’s family a renewed sense of hope. The Foreign Secretary has been a supporter of the campaign. He was alongside Alaa’s sisters during their sit-in outside the Foreign Office and publicly described Alaa as a “courageous voice for democracy in Egypt”. As shadow Foreign Secretary, he outlined a series of practical suggestions for getting Alaa back to the UK, which included leveraging our substantive trade relations with Egypt, restricting the access of the Egyptian ambassador and pausing new strategic partnerships with the Egyptian Government until Alaa’s case was resolved. The only relevant detail that has changed since the Foreign Secretary made those remarks as shadow Foreign Secretary is that Alaa’s sentence has now ended, but he remains in prison. Like the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), I call upon the Foreign Secretary to stay true to his words and to see through some of the actions that he outlined in 2022. He knew then, as is evident, that a strategy based solely on raising the case in meetings will not secure Alaa’s release. Ahead of 29 September, when Alaa was supposed to be released, multiple Members of this House wrote to the Foreign Secretary, alerting him to the end of Alaa’s sentence and asking him to ensure that appropriate action was taken. Just days before the 29th, the Foreign Secretary was pictured smiling with his Egyptian counterpart. On 21 November, our Prime Minister was photographed shaking hands with President Sisi. On 25 November, I tabled a question on whether the Prime Minister had raised Alaa’s case with the President on that occasion. I have not yet received a response. To be brutally frank, it is not clear that any serious steps have been taken to alert the Egyptian Government to the fact that Britain was expecting Alaa to be released on that date. It is still unclear whether the Government have changed their approach to the case since the date passed—