{"id":342761,"date":"2025-12-30T12:10:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T12:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/342761\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T12:10:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T12:10:07","slug":"uk-to-probe-british-egyptian-activist-case-failures-after-social-media-posts-cause-furor-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/342761\/","title":{"rendered":"UK to probe British-Egyptian activist case \u2018failures\u2019 after social media posts cause furor \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a letter to a U.K. parliamentary committee<\/a>, Cooper said she, Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy \u201cwere all unaware\u201d of historic tweets by Abd El-Fattah. \u201cWe consider them to be abhorrent,\u201d she said. Abd El-Fattah on Monday \u201cunequivocally\u201d apologized for the tweets.<\/p>\n

Cooper said current and former ministers were \u201cnever briefed on these tweets when they spoke publicly about the case,\u201d and civil servants in charge of the case \u201cwere also unaware\u201d of them.<\/p>\n

In her letter to the foreign affairs committee Cooper said she was \u201cdeeply concerned\u201d that the re-emergence of the historic posts \u2014 and the social media posts by senior politicians on Boxing Day welcoming Abd El-Fattah\u2019s reunion with his family \u2014 had \u201cadded to the distress felt by Jewish communities in the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was clear there had been an \u201cunacceptable failure\u201d and that long-standing due diligence procedures had been \u201ccompletely inadequate for this situation,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

A senior Foreign Office civil servant has been asked to review the \u201cserious information failures in this case\u201d and the broader systems in place in the department for carrying out due diligence on high-profile consular and human rights cases to make sure they are \u201cfunctioning properly for the future,\u201d Cooper said. <\/p>\n

Successive U.K. ministers campaigned for the release of Abd El-Fattah, who was convicted of \u201cspreading fake news\u201d in Egypt in 2021 for sharing a Facebook post about torture in the country.<\/p>\n

He was granted British citizenship in December 2021 through his London-born mother, when the opposition Conservatives were in power.<\/p>\n

The Conservatives<\/a> and Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform UK<\/a> are now calling for Abd El-Fattah to be stripped of U.K. citizenship and deported.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a letter to a U.K. parliamentary committee, Cooper said she, Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[625,22932,627,20069,59,57,58,937,420,50,633,470,224,56,54,55,20765],"class_list":{"0":"post-342761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-british-politics","9":"tag-citizenship","10":"tag-david-lammy","11":"tag-egypt","12":"tag-gb","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-greatbritain","15":"tag-human-rights","16":"tag-keir-starmer","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-nigel-farage","19":"tag-rights","20":"tag-social-media","21":"tag-uk","22":"tag-united-kingdom","23":"tag-unitedkingdom","24":"tag-yvette-cooper"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}