The pain of being separated from your child by prison walls is almost impossible to convey. During our family’s six-year ordeal, the cruelty of Nazanin being kept apart from our daughter Gabriella by the capricious machinery of Iran’s “justice” system often threatened to overwhelm us.
And now our hearts are breaking to see our dear friend Laila Soueif on the edge of life and death, in an attempt to save her eldest child Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a brave and principled British-Egyptian writer who has done nothing to deserve the years he has spent behind bars separated from his mother, young child and sisters.
Like Nazanin, Alaa is imprisoned unlawfully after a sham legal process, a fact attested to by United Nations experts. Like Nazanin, his family’s fate hangs increasingly on the efforts of the British government, which has the means to resolve the case but was far too slow off the mark in responding to an intolerable injustice and treated it as merely a diplomatic inconvenience.
After seeing the end of his most recent five-year sentence – for sharing a Facebook post about torture – pass in September without his release and without any acknowledgement from the British government, Laila embarked on a hunger strike in protest. She is still on that hunger strike, nearly nine months later. Only now, she is in a central London hospital bed.
When we visited Laila’s bedside last week, her daughters were anxiously monitoring her dangerously low blood sugar levels. Her endurance has been utterly astonishing, but her body cannot hold out forever. Her doctors implore her to accept some nutrients, but she is determined that she will not relent without tangible progress towards his release. She reminds everyone that behind those prison walls, Alaa has himself been on hunger strike for nearly 100 days.
For us, Laila’s protest brings back memories of Richard’s 21-day hunger strike and sit-in outside the Foreign Office in 2021, what that felt like as his body shut down, and we were left with stubborn will, the growing fear in the family’s eyes. It was a step he took in desperation, when the British government had also downplayed the end of Nazanin’s sentence, and the Iranians had reconvicted her, and told her to prepare for a new bout of imprisonment, while the UK watched on.
While Richard was sitting hungry and cold on the London pavement, he had a visit from Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition. Days later, he called Nazanin – then on house arrest in Tehran – and committed to do what he could to help get her home. His promise to our family and his continued backing for her freedom and resolve to the government were important for the ultimate success of our campaign. He took a celebration photo with us days after Nazanin came home.
What we ask now is that as prime minister, Starmer shows this same leadership to secure the release of Alaa. In February, he met Laila and made another promise, to press for Alaa’s release. He has spoken to president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi about the case and stressed to him the “anguish” the family are going through.
Those were good first steps, but Alaa and his family need much more – and faster. We learned a lot about the power of politicians’ words in our case, negative and positive. But we also learned to judge a government by its actions, not its words. Leading parliamentarians and former senior diplomats have called for stronger steps, including reviewing Britain’s travel advice to Egypt to highlight the risks of unfair imprisonment, considering legal action and even sanctions. All this was done for Iran in our case.
This government came to power promising to learn the lessons from our case, and to make the protection of arbitrarily detained British nationals a key pillar of its foreign policy. Nazanin was invited to hear this announced at the Labour conference. The election manifesto committed to establishing a legal right to consular protection, a promise we are still waiting to be kept. As shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy was often critical of the Tory government’s drift in Alaa’s case. Now it is his decision making which has prompted her hunger strike.
Ultimately, Alaa’s case – like Nazanin’s before it – asks a simple question of this government: when it comes to unfair imprisonments overseas, what does the protection of a British passport actually mean? The promises of the opposition are often forgotten when politicians get into government. But when it comes to arbitrary detention and torture, where people are so acutely vulnerable without their government’s protections, the consequences of a failure to deliver can be particularly traumatic – as we discovered in our own case across the years of waiting for a prime minister to keep his word.
Increasingly, it also asks: what price is a mother’s love? It took reserves of strength that Nazanin never knew she had to overcome her enforced separation from Gabriella. Laila is using every last drop of energy in her body in an effort to be reunited with her son. Visiting her this week was something humbling, but also haunting to see. The whole family is a prisoner now.
We implore the prime minister and his government to honour his promises: time to bring Alaa home to Laila – and time to change the way this country deals with the arbitrary detention of its citizens, before desperation strikes the next family.
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