Alaa Abd-El Fattah: You have not yet been defeated

Reading

Alaa Abd El-Fattah, without doubt one of Egypt's most prominent political prisoners, has spent most of the past ten years in prison - under Husni Mubarak and Mohammed Mursi as well as under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In October 2022, he has been on hunger strike for more than six months.

Back in 2017, Alaa Abd El-Fattah wrote from his imprisonment in the notorious Tora prison: "Unlike me, you have not yet been defeated". He was addressing all those who can continue to publicly denounce the injustice that has been happening to him and tens of thousands of others for years: The Egyptian regime suppresses debate on human rights violations by forcibly disappearing its critics, torturing and imprisoning them, and barely allowing family members to contact them.

Yet Abd El-Fattah has always found ways to share his thoughts, both personal and political, with his fellow activists. Thanks to the painstaking and dangerous work of a collective, the collected texts have now been published in German for the first time. They include essays smuggled out of prison, Abd El-Fattah's speeches during the rare court hearings and public contributions on social media.

On the occasion of the publication of the German edition of You have not yet been defeated/Ihr seid noch nicht besiegt, the Heinrich Böll Foundation invites you to a reading of selected texts. The subsequent discussion will focus on the situation of political prisoners in Egypt and the question of how German and European foreign policy can and should react to the human rights violations in Egypt.

You can find more information here.

Language: German / English (simultaneous translation)

Wednesday, November 30
Kuppelhalle
Start: 7 pm
Free admission / Registration here