The COP27, the climate conference will bring together all the leaders of the planet in Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt from this weekend. A capital event to try to move forward in the fight against climate change, but which will only be a great moment of greenwashing if at the same time, a few kilometers from the place where fine words will be spoken, hundreds of human rights defenders are languishing in prison, locked up because they are inconveniencing the Egyptian regime.
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This is what 15 Nobel Prize winners denounce in an open letter published on Wednesday 2 November. “We urge the world not to forget the thousands of political detainees in Egypt and especially the British-Egyptian author and philosopher Alaa Abdel Fattah (…) If the world meets in Egypt and then leaves without a word for the most fragile, what hope can these prisoners have? If COP27 ends without anyone daring to speak for fear of upsetting the Egyptian presidency, then what is the future negotiated there?“.
“If we submit to our nightmares, then fear will kill us long before the climate deluge.”
15 Nobel Prizesin an open letter
Alaa Abdel Fattah, 40, is a blogger, nicknamed “the icon of the revolution” who has been languishing in prison for nearly a decade. Egyptian justice has sentenced her a dozen times, the last for “disseminating false information” without the possibility of appealing. The verdict aroused indignation, the mobilization of dozens of NGOs, in vain. Beaten, abused, tortured, six months ago, Alaa Abdel Fattah decided to go on a hunger strike, and this week he announced that at the opening of COP27, he would stop drinking alcohol. water. He would rather die and this prospect is generating an outpouring of support, Greta Thunberg to Annie Ernaux, the writer who, along with Patrick Modiano and 13 other Nobel Prize winners, signed this open letter to demand her release.
“If we submit to our nightmares, write the Nobels, then fear will kill us long before the climatic deluge.“The nightmare they denounce is indeed the authoritarian regime of Marshal Sissi. A regime which on Monday, October 31 arrested an Indian environmental activist who was marching for the climate in Cairo. The letter from the Nobels is therefore a test, a challenge that they sent to the UN Secretary General, to the American Joe Biden, to Emmanuel Macron too, in short to all those who will be in Egypt, and who will have the power to speak without being arrested.