Alaa Abd El-Fattah

Alaa Ahmed Seif Abd-El Fattah (علاء أحمد سيف الإسلام عبد الفتاح, ; born 18 November 1981), known professionally as Alaa Abd El-Fattah (علاء عبد الفتاح), is an Egyptian-British blogger, software developer and a political activist.

He has been active in developing Arabic-language versions of software and platforms.

Abd El-Fattah was born on 18 November 1981 in Cairo, Egypt.

He was raised in a family of well-known Egyptian activists.

His father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad, a human rights attorney who had been arrested in 1983 by State Security Investigations Service officers and tortured and imprisoned for five years, is one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center.

His mother Laila Soueif, the sister of the novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif, is a professor of mathematics at Cairo University and a political activist.

His parents' activism began in the Anwar Sadat era.

During a demonstration in 2005, his mother and other women, were attacked by Mubarak supporters; Abd El-Fattah was said to have protected her.

One of his sisters is Mona Seif, a founding member of "No Military Trials for Civilians", a group raising awareness for the civilian detainees summoned by military prosecutors and investigating torture allegations involving military police.

His other sister, Sanaa Seif, is an activist and film editor who co-founded a newspaper about the Arab spring called 'Gornal'.

Abd El-Fattah co-founded with his wife Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan (daughter of activist Bahi El-Din Hassan), the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa and Omraneya, the first Arab blog aggregators that did not restrict inclusion based on the content of the blog.

In 2005, the Manalaa blog won the Special Reporters Without Borders Award in Deutsche Welle's Best of Blogs competition.

He has supported initiatives that promote citizen journalism on social media and has more than 600,000 people following his personal Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Abd El-Fattah has been questioned, arrested and detained on several occasions.

He was arrested on 7 May 2006 when demonstrating for an independent judiciary and released on 20 June 2006.

On 7 May 2006, Abd El-Fattah was arrested during a peaceful protest after he called for an independent judiciary.

His arrest, along with that of several other bloggers and activists, spurred solidarity protests by others around the world, some of whom created the blog "Free Alaa" devoted to calling for his release from jail.

Abd El-Fattah was released on 20 June 2006, after spending 45 days in jail.

His wife Manal was quoted by the London Independent as saying: "There's no going back now, we'll definitely be continuing our activities."

According to Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram Weekly, Abd el-Fattah's name "is in many ways synonymous with Egypt's 25 January Revolution."

Abd El-Fattah participated in nearly every demonstration after the revolution began.

On 30 October 2011, he was arrested for inciting violence at the 9 October Maspero clashes and released on 25 December 2011.

During his two-month detention in 2011, his son Khaled was born and during his three-month detention in 2014, his father Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad died.

He was not in Egypt on 25 January 2011, when the anti-regime protests began and when the Egyptian government shut down the internet in the country.

However, he was able to collect information from family and friends by land-line phones and published to the outside world the events occurring in Egypt during the first days of the revolution.

On 26 March 2013, he was arrested for inciting aggression during a protest outside Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters, known as the Mokattam Clashes of March 2013 but was later acquitted on all charges.

Two days later, on 28 March 2013, he was arrested and charged for torching former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik's campaign headquarters on 28 May 2012, and received a suspended one-year jail term.

On 28 November 2013, he was arrested for rallying, inciting violence, resisting authorities and violating the Anti-protest Law after a demonstration against military trials for civilians outside Shura Council building on 26 November 2013.

He was imprisoned in Egypt for allegedly organising a political protest without requesting authorization, though he was released on bail on 23 March 2014.

He was rearrested and ordered released on bail again on 15 September 2014, subsequently sentenced to a month of jail in absentia, and received a five-year sentence in February 2015, which he was released from in late March 2019.

Abd El-Fattah remained subject to a five-year parole period, requiring him to stay at a police station for 12 hours daily, from evening until morning.

He was initially released on 23 March 2014, after 115 days in detention.

In June 2014, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison and detained again awaiting his retrial, during which time he went on a hunger strike.

In his retrial on 15 September 2014, he was released on bail.

In 2021, an anthology of his writing—some smuggled out from his jail cell — translated into English by anonymous supporters, was published, under the title You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

It has a foreword by Naomi Klein.

In July 2022, an Arabic translation of the book was published by Jusur, a Lebanese publishing house based in Beirut, under the title Shabah' Al-Rabea'.

On 29 September, during the 2019 Egyptian protests, Abd El-Fattah was arrested by the National Security Agency and taken to State Security Prosecution on charges that were unknown.

He was subsequently convicted of "spreading fake news" and jailed for five years.

In April 2022 he began a hunger strike.