Egypt lifts travel ban on Arab Spring figure Alaa Abdel-Fattah

Egyptian courts have lifted a travel ban on well-known Egyptian-British human rights activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah, his lawyer said on Saturday.

An emblematic figure of the 2011 uprising against the power of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Alaa Abdel-Fattah, 44, has spent most of the last decade behind bars.

In September, he benefited from a pardon granted by President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi after long months of waiting and intense mobilization.

Travel ban

Despite this pardon, Egyptian authorities prevented him from traveling to Cairo airport last month, as he was preparing to fly to Great Britain, his sister Sanaa Seif said.

He was to receive the Magnitsky Prize, awarded jointly to him and his mother, the mathematician Laila Soueif, a figure of the intellectual left. “The Attorney General approved the removal of Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s name from the travel ban lists, based on a request filed on our part,” Me Khaled Ali said on Saturday.

Opposed to the authorities who succeeded Hosni Mubarak, Alaa Abdel-Fattah was last arrested in 2019 for publishing a message on Facebook evoking police violence, then sentenced to five years in prison in 2021 for “false information”, an accusation frequently used in Egypt against dissident voices.

Two months before his release, a Cairo court removed his name from the list of people suspected of terrorism, concluding that he no longer had any links with the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement banned in Egypt.

Since 2022, Egyptian authorities have released hundreds of detainees and pardoned several opposition figures. However, human rights organizations estimate that tens of thousands of political prisoners remain detained, accusations rejected by the authorities.