(Washington) Joe Biden intends to discuss human rights in Egypt, where he will go for COP27, and in Cambodia, where he will attend the ASEAN debates, according to senior White House officials.
Posted at 4:46 p.m.
The US president will have a bilateral meeting with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sissi on Friday during his short stopover to attend the major climate summit, and he is “never afraid to discuss human rights with foreign leaders,” said a senior official in an interview with the press.
She indicated that the White House was “worried about the fate and health of Alaa Abdel Fattah”, and assured that Washington had said so “repeatedly to the Egyptian government”.
The Egyptian-British, icon of the 2011 revolution, was arrested at the end of 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison. He is in mortal danger after seven months of hunger strike.
“We will continue to ask the Egyptian government to release political prisoners”, whose number NGOs estimate at more than 60,000 in the country, said a senior source in the White House.
However, she did not specify whether Joe Biden would concretely call for the release of Alaa Abdel Fattah.
The issue of democracy and human rights the person is also expected to be on the agenda for Joe Biden’s bilateral meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, host of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit.
The American president wants to evoke “the importance of supporting the aspirations of the Cambodian people for a prosperous, democratic and independent country” and to insist on “the importance of respecting the rights of the person, including our concern about certain specific cases,” said another senior US administration official.
He did not give more details on the “specific cases” in question.
Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge fighter, is one of the world’s longest-serving leaders.
Since the 2018 legislative elections, after which his party won all the seats in Parliament – strongly contested results – the regime has multiplied arrests and procedures against any dissenting voice.
Among these voices, lawyer Theary Seng. This recently imprisoned opponent, who also has American nationality, has started a hunger strike to protest against her conditions of detention.