The Egyptian activist, Alaa Abdel Fattah, is on hunger strike for the 44th consecutive day, protesting against his poor conditions of detention, and he demands to have all his rights as a prisoner respected, including being allowed to exercise, see the sunlight, and be allowed to have access to his books and his clothes.
Alaa Abdel-Fattah, 40, has been imprisoned since September 2013. He is currently serving a five-year sentence issued by an exceptional court last December. He was charged with allegedly publishing false news after he re-published a tweet on the death of a prisoner under torture in prison.
Alaa’s mother, Laila Soueif, shared a post on Facebook saying that Alaa went on a hunger strike, as he cannot continue to be detained in solitary confinement inside a maximum-security prison that does not respect laws while being denied reading and exercising.
Alaa Abdel Fattah is considered one important figure of the 2011 revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, under whose reign he was subjected to imprisonment several times. He was imprisoned again after the coup against the late President Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
Alaa was arrested in September 2019, less than six months after his release from prison, after completing a previous sentence of five years in prison for also spreading false news.
Meanwhile, dozens of detainees are on hunger strike protesting against the conditions of their detention, most notably the lawyer Ziad Al-Alimi, the researcher Ahmed Santawi, the journalist Hisham Fouad, the activist Ahmed Doma, and the activist Ahmed Tarek, known as “Mocha”, amid unconfirmed news of some of them ending their hunger strike.
