SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Chants of “free them
all” and “no climate justice without human rights” rang out between the halls
of
COP27 Saturday, in the largest protest since the UN climate summit began.
اضافة اعلان
Jailed Egyptian dissident
Alaa Abdel Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, who is at the summit campaigning for her brother’s release,
marched in the front line with hundreds behind her.
Seven months into a hunger strike, Abdel Fattah
began refusing water last Sunday, as world leaders arrived in the Egyptian
resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for COP27.
With them came Seif, who at two press conferences
this week was heckled by apparently pro-regime attendees, who called her
brother a “criminal,” not a “political prisoner”
Behind her on Saturday — winding between halls
inside which world leaders negotiated over the climate crisis — hundreds of
protesters demanded urgent action towards climate justice and human rights, an
AFP correspondent said.
Although demonstrations at COP27 must be approved by
organizing authorities and should take place only in a special zone, activists
behind Saturday’s rally said they got UN permission for their action outside
the designated area.
They marched behind a banner reading, “You have not
yet been defeated” — the title of Abdel Fattah’s book, which has become a
rallying cry for summit activists.
The demonstrators incorporated the words into their
demands for indigenous, women’s, labor, and disability rights. Multiple
speakers have ended their speeches in the conference’s formal proceedings with
the same sentence.
“I came here thinking I would be alone. I am sure
that those in power thought that my voice would be drowned out and ignored.
Instead, I found that my family was already here waiting for me,” protest
organizer Asad Rehman read from a statement from Seif.
Abdel Fattah was a key figure in Egypt’s Arab Spring
uprising more than a decade ago. He began consuming “only 100 calories a day”
in April, his family said, to protest the conditions he and about 60,000 other
political prisoners face in the country.
His family says they fear for his life, and have
made months-long appeals to the international community, particularly the UK,
where Abdel Fattah gained citizenship this year from behind bars through his
British-born mother.
Some world leaders have raised his case with
Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in bilateral meetings during the
climate talks.
The family made an official request for a
presidential pardon from President Sisi Friday, Abdel Fattah’s other sister
announced.
The plea has been picked up by one of Egypt’s
most-watched talk show hosts, the ardently pro-Sisi Amr Adib. On prime-time
television Friday, Adib said the pardon would be in “the interest of Egypt
first and foremost”.
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