Writer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah's name has been removed from travel ban lists by a public prosecutor's decision, lawyer Khaled Ali announced in a Facebook post on Saturday. The move followed a complaint Ali filed on November 13. It comes after Abd El Fattah's release from prison in late September under a presidential pardon.
Alaa Abd El Fattah discovered in November that he was under a travel ban when security authorities at Cairo International Airport stopped him from boarding a flight to London, where he was set to receive the Magnitsky Human Rights Award for Courage Under Fire with his mother, Laila Soueif.
Authorities told him the ban was tied to an ongoing investigation in State Security Case 1356/2019, without providing formal notice or detailing reasons or duration.
Abd El Fattah was released from prison in late September under a presidential pardon, after a final hunger strike he started when promises from the National Security Agency to free him went unfulfilled. This strike came after an earlier one he launched amid his mother's sharp health decline during her 300-day hunger strike for his freedom.
Abd El Fattah has faced arrests and prosecutions since 2006 for his activism. He was detained in 2019 and held in pretrial detention for two years before trial on false news charges, receiving a five-year sentence. But when the sentence expired in September last year, authorities refused to credit his pretrial time.
From 2013 to 2025, Abd El Fattah served two five-year prison terms in separate cases, with daily police probation imposed between them as an extension of the first ruling. Despite imprisonment, his prison writings won several awards, most recently in October 2024.
During his final imprisonment, Abd El Fattah gained British citizenship at his family's request, as his mother was born in the United Kingdom. His citizenship fueled British diplomatic pressure for his release, driven by persistent family advocacy, before he was freed following a petition from the National Council for Human Rights, alongside repeated appeals from his family, lawyers, and public figures.
The lifting of the travel ban opens a new chapter for one of Egypt's most prominent political prisoners of the past decade.
