
Reflections from FairSquare co-director James Lynch on the UK’s foreign policy and human rights in Egypt. This article was first published in OpenDemocracy.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a British citizen who has spent most of the last decade behind bars in Egypt, persecuted for his writing and activism. Jess Kelly has spent two years campaigning for a travel ban and assets freeze imposed on her husband, human rights activist Karim Ennarah, to be lifted so he can join her in the UK.
These are just two examples of the dire human rights situation in Egypt – but earlier this month, both Kelly and supporters of Abdel Fattah saw a moment of opportunity when foreign minister Sameh Shoukry visited London to meet his counterpart, Liz Truss.
The day of the visit, Truss tweeted: “As the threat from authoritarian regimes intensifies, NATO stands united in defending freedom & democracy.” Any hopes this might influence her approach to Egypt, which subjects its population to a “harsh authoritarian grip”, were dashed, however. As the two ministers inaugurated the UK-Egypt Association Council, a small reference to human rights was buried in the penultimate paragraph of their joint statement, underneath details of the Cairo monorail project and the sale of two naval auxiliary ships.
Kelly said in a statement that she was “incredibly disappointed” that there was no evidence Truss had raised her husband’s case. Meanwhile Abdel Fattah’s sister Mona Saif called on the British government to “stop diffusing Alaa’s case in general statements about human rights”. Her brother has since passed 100 days on hunger strike.
The affair has led some to question whether the British government’s human rights commitments have any meaning at all. Richard Spencer, Middle East correspondent for The Times, argued that British promotion of human rights overseas has given rise to “no observable improvement and a high degree of hypocrisy”. He concluded that it is time to accept that “the focus on human rights as the ‘ethical’ part of our foreign policy was always wrong-headed”.
Spencer is clearly right to highlight the painfully obvious double standards, in which our stance on Ukraine is framed as part of a global struggle against authoritarians, but we are turning to Saudi Arabia to help us in that battle. Truss was badly embarrassed last month when she couldn’t name a single occasion she had raised human rights with a Gulf leader. And it’s not only a British issue: President Biden is this week heading for Saudi Arabia, which he had previously said should be a “pariah state”. He has strained to explain how this visit squares with his belief that the global threat to democracy represents the “defining challenge of our time”.
As a former diplomat, I know first-hand how difficult it is to make human rights a priority for government. During my time at the Foreign Office, despite public commitments to defend and promote ‘values’, human rights generally played second or third fiddle to commercial and security goals. But the suggestion that we should accept the marginalisation of human rights, just because our work is weak and inconsistent, worries me.
I have heard one influential figure on foreign policy within the Tory party privately comment that if we could stop the pretence of caring about human rights, at least then we could be honest and consistent about our trade and security priorities. Perhaps this shouldn’t be that surprising, given that opposition to the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Human Rights is increasingly a prerequisite for anyone who wants to lead the Conservatives.
Yet weak and inconsistent as it is, our support for human rights really matters. Arguably, a key reason that Egypt allows a small measure of legitimate human rights activity to continue is because of the irregular needling on the issue from the Sisi regime’s Western partners in Europe and the US, whose support it still needs. Western pressure on human rights is not that serious, but it exists: Macron made a point of visiting human rights organisations in Cairo in 2019, before he gave Sisi the Legion d’honneur the following year. The US withheld a small portion of its security assistance to Egypt on human rights grounds earlier this year. Even post-Brexit Britain, in search of deeper trade links, has been willing to sign up to statements at the UN criticising Egypt’s rights record.
This contrasts with countries where the West doesn’t even bother to apply pressure. In the UAE, for instance, where British policy has been at its most meek and international pressure has been minimal, there is not a single independent human rights activist who is not in prison or in exile.
Despite the failures of the past, the UK’s voice still matters. Justified or not, its positions on human rights issues retain weight – to the extent that countries like Egypt, Israel, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia lobby intensely to stop it using that voice. My experience is that human rights activists in the Middle East tend to be brutally realistic about our hypocrisy, but they nevertheless see the value of British support. The prospect of this meagre support being withdrawn entirely is grim, given the dire prospects for civil society in authoritarian states.
The answer to British hypocrisy on human rights, then, is not to drop the human rights, but to start tackling the hypocrisy. We should also rid ourselves of the pretence that we have no influence or leverage with our authoritarian partners. Britain could solve Abdel Fattah’s case. It could get Karim Ennarah’s travel ban lifted. As a start, it should make clear that such cases will severely undermine Egypt’s hosting of the COP27 climate talks later this year. It just requires a small shifting of priorities.