Popular summer holiday destination 'police state' warning

Yahoo

2 days ago

A former British ambassador to Egypt has called for the Foreign Office to caution against travel to the country amid fears British nationals face an increased risk of arrest in a country that is popular with holidaymakers and travellers.
John Casson, who was British ambassador to Egypt between 2014 and 2018, described the country as a 'police state' which is 'violent and vindictive', when he spoke on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday.
His comments follow a ruling by a UN panel that Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist who in December 2021 was sentenced to five years in prison after being accused of spreading false news, is being illegally detained by the Egyptian government.
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The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) said Mr Abd El-Fattah was imprisoned because of his political views.
'This is a police state in Egypt: it's violent, it's vindictive,' Mr Casson told the Today programme. 'It's abusing a British citizen, Alaa Abd El-Fattah – tortured him. It's kept him in prison on bogus charges. It's causing a lot of distress to his family.
'But it's also abusing the rights of the British Government to do its normal business, and it's blocking our embassy for the most fundamental function of visiting and supporting British nationals when they get into trouble.
'And that's why, with other parliamentarians today… I'm calling now for our Government to use all the tools it has to protect not just Alaa Abd El-Fattah, but all British citizens in Egypt. And that means, especially now, our official travel advice needs to caution against travel to Egypt.'
Mr Casson joined political figures, including Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws and Lord Hain, the former Middle East minister, to urge the Government to review its travel advice for Egypt in a letter published in The Times on Wednesday. He said the case of Mr Abd El-Fattah is not isolated as any British national travelling to Egypt faces arrest and illegal detention.
He told the BBC: 'After four years as ambassador in Egypt, if a friend or family came to me today and said, 'Should we be booking our winter sun in Egypt?', I would be saying you're taking a real risk.
'If you get into any kind of difficulties, you post the wrong thing on social media even, there's no guarantee (of) your right to be protected.
'There's no guarantee of due process, and we can't even be sure that the British embassy will be able to visit you or support you in the normal way.'
He added: 'If I just think back to the four years I spent in Egypt, there was a Cambridge University student who was tortured to death over a period of several days in police cells.
'There was a British woman who went on for a beach holiday in Egypt, and found herself in in prison for a year because she had too many painkillers in her luggage.
'There was a string of child kidnap cases where British children were abducted by their estranged Egyptian parents, and the Egyptian authorities did not give protection to the rights of those children or the rights of their British families.'
Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni was abducted and killed in Cairo in 2016. Italy accused Egyptian police officers of killing him, a charge Egypt denied.
In 2017, British national Laura Plummer was sentenced to three years in an Egyptian prison for taking 290 Tramadol tablets into the country.
Mr Casson told the BBC: 'Of course, our civil servants are always cautious about offending a country like Egypt, and that's why we're really saying this: this needs political will.
'It takes political will and a readiness to take real action and say that Egypt can't have it both ways. Egypt pretends to be a friend.
'It depends on British visitors to keep its economy afloat, and we need to demonstrate that that is not compatible with abusing our citizens and blocking our embassy. We can't have business as usual.'
Last week, 100 MPs and peers urged Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to 'deploy every tool' available to help free Mr Abd El-Fattah.