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The family of jailed dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah on Thursday called on British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to intervene in his case when he attends the COP27 climate summit in Egypt next week.
Abdel Fattah is on hunger strike and his relatives warned that if he is not released during the summit, he will probably die in prison as he is due to stop drinking fluids from Sunday, the opening day of COP27.
A major figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Abdel Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence for “broadcasting false news”, having already spent much of the past decade behind bars.
He gained British citizenship in prison in April through his UK-born mother.
Cairo has faced frequent criticism of its human rights record since it was announced as the host of the COP27 climate summit last year, a move rights groups said “rewards the repressive rule” of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
“I want to call on Rishi Sunak to intervene,” one of Abdel Fattah’s sisters, Sanaa Seif, told reporters in London on Thursday.
“You’re going to see Sisi… and if you don’t show that you care, it would be interpreted as a green light to kill him,” she said.
Sanaa said the family had received a call from Britain’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on Wednesday and on Thursday met junior foreign minister Tariq Ahmad.
Another sister, Mona Seif, added that if their brother was not freed during the climate conference it was almost certain he “is going to die in prison”.
The activist has only been consuming 100 calories a day in the form of a spoonful of honey and a drop of milk in tea and would begin a dry hunger strike from Sunday, she said.
In an open letter published on Wednesday, 15 Nobel laureates called on Egypt to release Abdel Fattah.
Among the 13 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates who signed the letter are J. M. Coetzee, Louise Gluck, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Herta Muller, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka, according to British publishing house Fitzcarraldo Editions.
More than 90 heads of state and government are set to attend the November 6-18 summit in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh.
Rights group estimate that some 60,000 political prisoners are behind bars in Egypt, many of them in brutal conditions and overcrowded cells, accusations that Cairo rejects.