Alaa Abdel-Fattah, activist on hunger strike in Egypt prison, given

Jailed Egyptian rights activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah, who began refusing even water after more than 200 days on a hunger strike at the start of the COP27 climate conference, has received “medical intervention,” his family has been told. Prison authorities told his mother on Thursday that measures had been taken “with the knowledge of a judicial authority.”

“We are demanding information on the substance of the ‘medical intervention’ and demanding that with the utmost urgency he is moved to hospital where lawyers and family can reach him,” the activist’s family said in a statement provided to CBS News.   

Alaa, a dual Egyptian-British citizen who was an important figure in the pro-democracy “Arab Spring” movement more than a decade ago, has been imprisoned in Egypt for virtually the entire tenure of Egypt’s current authoritarian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, since 2014. Alaa’s family and human rights groups call the charges against him spurious.

The head of the United Nations human rights office called on Tuesday for Abdel-Fattah’s immediate release, warning that he was “in great danger.” A spokesman for the U.N. rights office said the global body had last raised the issue of the activist’s health with the Egyptian authorities on Friday, and that they were calling for him “to be urgently, immediately released.” 

Meanwhile, Abdel-Fattah’s sister Sanaa Seif, who travelled to Egypt from London early this week to be at the COP27 summit in the hope of increasing pressure on international leaders to campaign for her brother’s release, was told that a complaint had been filed against her asking Egypt’s public prosecutor to charge her with “conspiring with foreign agencies hostile to the Egyptian state” and “deliberately spreading false news,” her family said in a statement. 

“Anybody can submit a complaint to the General Prosecutor’s office, and it’s up to him to decide whether or not to proceed with it,” Abdel-Fattah’s other sister Mona said in a statement. “But with our experience in our family, it is usually the case that complaints that we submit about crimes committed against us are ignored, while complaints that are filed against us by random people we don’t know, is usually the Egyptian state’s way of starting a new case against one of us. So there’s a very strong possibility that this is what they’re preparing next for Sanaa.”