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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has granted a presidential pardon to Egyptian-British activist and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a prominent figure of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. State-aligned television channels confirmed his release after years of campaigning by his family and diplomatic pressure from the British government, including a personal appeal from Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier this year.
The 43-year-old has spent much of the past decade behind bars, most recently serving a five-year sentence handed down in December 2021 for sharing a social media post about a prisoner’s death. Abd el-Fattah first encountered detention before the 2011 revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, but his situation worsened after former army chief Sisi ousted Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 and launched a sweeping crackdown in which hundreds of protesters were killed.
Renowned for his influential blogs and social media posts that amplified the voices of demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Abd el-Fattah was previously jailed in 2015 for participating in a protest without official approval. Although briefly released on probation in 2019 and reunited with his young son, he was forced to spend each night at a police station until his re-arrest in September that year.
