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Jailed Activist in Egypt Escalates Hunger Strike as COP27 Begins [1]
['Vivian Yee', 'More About Vivian Yee']
Date: 2022-11-07
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — The world leaders, government negotiators, climate scientists and other dignitaries are unlikely to see his name anywhere in Sharm el Sheikh, the beach resort city hosting the COP27 summit. But Alaa Abd El Fattah, Egypt’s most prominent revolutionary voice and its most famous political prisoner, is making his absence felt.
Mr. Abd El Fattah, an activist and software developer who has been imprisoned for most of the last nine years for his condemnations of Egypt’s authoritarian government, went on hunger strike in April, hoping to pressure officials into releasing him. For nearly seven months, he has consumed only milk, honey and tea. In late October, his family said he had stopped eating altogether.
On Sunday, he began refusing water, perhaps bringing himself closer to death just as the United Nations climate conference began.
“I’ve taken a decision to escalate at a time I see as fitting for my struggle for my freedom and the freedom of” other Egyptian prisoners of conscience, Mr. Abd El Fattah’s family members said he had written in his latest letter to them, which they received last week. He called his fellow prisoners “victims of a regime that’s unable to handle its crises except with oppression, unable to reproduce itself except through incarceration.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/climate/alaa-abd-el-fattah-cop27-hunger-strike-egypt.html
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