The UN climate summit in Egypt has afforded local rights defenders rare visibility, but some fear a backlash after global attention shifts away from President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's regime.

With little promise of speedy united action to tackle the climate crisis, many headlines out of COP27 have focussed on the plight of Egyptian activists, most prominently jailed dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah.

"We needed this," Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said Tuesday at a press conference that he noted would have been "impossible" in Cairo.

As dozens of world leaders converged on the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh this week, some made mention of rights in Egypt and several directly called for the release of hunger striker Abdel Fattah.

But, more generally, Bahgat said, the international community has in recent years "forgotten" the country while repression increased under successive regimes following the 2011 Arab Spring revolution.

"There has been a degree of normalisation of repression."

The Arab world's most populous country now holds 60,000 political prisoners behind bars, rights groups say, a charge the government denies.

- Battling chants -

Some groups had urged a boycott of COP27 over the host's rights record. Similar calls have been made concerning next year's host, the United Arab Emirates, but veteran activist Bahgat disagrees.

"COPs should go where civil society and activists need to be heard and seen," he said.

Bahgat noted travel bans on dissidents, like the one imposed on him, are intended "specifically to keep us out of venues like this one".

The discussion at the press conference kept circling back to the situation of jailed British-Egyptian Abdel Fattah, who has refused water since COP27 began on Sunday, after seven months of consuming only "100 calories a day" of food.

But mentions of the 40-year-old activist, an icon of the 2011 revolution, did not go unchallenged by apparent supporters of Sisi's regime.

During two separate events on Tuesday, Abdel Fattah's sister Sanaa Seif, who is at the UN summit campaigning for his release, was heckled by Egyptian attendees defending her brother's continued detention, with one pro-Sisi parliamentarian escorted out by UN security.

A small group chanted "Free Alaa! Free them all!" after the second event, to which a handful of attendees yelled back "Alaa is a terrorist," according to AFP correspondents.

Bahgat told AFP that "in the past week, a large number of Egyptian figures received last-minute host country badges, and this is the role they're expected to play".

Despite the disruptions, Seif told a press conference the family "did not expect" the overwhelming show of solidarity in Egypt, where repeated crackdowns have left a crumbling civil society.

The thousands of foreign delegates in Sharm el-Sheikh found they were not immune to Egypt's robust censorship.

Some said they struggled to work due to internet blocks, which for five years have stopped Egyptians from accessing scores of websites.

On Tuesday, according to AFP correspondents, some websites, including US-based platform Medium and Human Rights Watch, were suddenly accessible, and WhatsApp voice calls that had been famously banned in Egypt were working across the country.

- 'Risk of reprisal' -

Human Rights Watch said allowing access to its website was "a positive move", but "many other news and human rights websites expressing criticism remain blocked and inaccessible".

Ending censorship of "all media and civil society groups" could be "a first step toward easing the broader repression campaign against independent voices in Egypt", the group said in a statement.

Other examples of measures COP27 attendees have met include potential tracking through Egypt's official app for the conference, according to rights groups, and a "security observatory" that is being fed footage from surveillance cameras in taxis across Sharm el-Sheikh, according to the provincial governor.

"Away from the dazzling resort hotels, thousands of individuals including human rights defenders, journalists, peaceful protesters and members of the political opposition continue to be detained unjustly," Amnesty International charged in a statement.

Since October, more than 150 people have been "arbitrarily detained" amid a crackdown over a mysterious online call for protests this Friday, Egyptian rights group reported.

After years of suppressing dissenting voices and restricting free speech and media, the spectre of what happens when COP27 is over haunts what appears to be sporadic progress during the mega-event.

"This is something that is on every Egyptian activist's mind, and has been since the buildup towards COP," Bahgat said. "Of course we know there is a risk of reprisal. That was the decision we had to make."

For him, "it was a calculated risk" that required "contingency plans" should anything go wrong "before, during or after COP".

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Jailed Egypt dissident's death in 'no one's interest', sister says
Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (AFP) Nov 7, 2022
The possible death of jailed British-Egyptian dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah in prison is "in no one's interest", his sister Sanaa Seif said, nearly two days after he started refusing water. Following a seven-month hunger strike during which he only had 100 calories per day, Abdel Fattah stopped drinking water on Sunday to coincide with the opening of the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt. Widely considered Egypt's best-known dissident, he has been sentenced to five years in prison for " ... read more