Labour claims Alaa Abd el-Fattah cannot be stripped of British citizenship despite extremist social media posts. Photo / Instagram, @freedomforalaa
The UK government has claimed that an alleged Egyptian extremist cannot be stripped of his British citizenship.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, is facing calls to deport Alaa Abd el-Fattah over social media posts in which he called for Zionists to be killed and described British people as “dogs and monkeys”.
Fattah, who was released from prison in Egypt earlier this year, was granted citizenship in 2021 by the Conservative government without the need for any “good character” checks.
However, after his social media posts emerged, the leaders of both the Tories and Reform UK called for Starmer’s government to strip him of his citizenship. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is the only person with the power to revoke citizenship, but must prove a legal basis for doing so.
Now it is understood that officials are unlikely to act because they do not believe Fattah’s comments meet the high legal bar for revoking nationality, or that he poses a significant threat to national security.
Downing Street is also understood to be fearful that an attempt to remove the Egyptian activist’s UK nationality could be struck down by the courts.
Government sources have argued that there is a very high legal bar for depriving someone of citizenship, which Fattah is unlikely to meet despite his social media posts.
Starmer’s spokesman said that while the Prime Minister condemned Fattah’s tweets, he stood by his controversial decision to welcome him to the UK. He said: “Of course we welcome the return of a British citizen unfairly detained abroad.”
Fattah has apologised over the historical posts, but claimed some had been “twisted of their meaning”.
Emily Thornberry, the senior Labour MP who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee, suggested that Fattah “sending a tweet 15 years ago” was not evidence enough for him to be legally classified as “a threat to national security”.
Dame Emily said it would be impossible to remove Fattah’s citizenship in response to calls by Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, for ministers to act.
She told the BBC: “You can only take it if they are a threat to national security. I really don’t think that Chris Philp is going to be able to tell us of an example of sending a tweet 15 years ago and that being a threat to national security.”
Typically, nationality can only be removed from people who either obtain citizenship by fraud or who are considered to be the most dangerous individuals in society, such as terrorists, extremists and those involved in serious organised crime.
Fattah would have the right to appeal any suspension of his citizenship, which the Home Office would have to defend in the courts at a significant cost to the taxpayer.
The Egyptian activist’s case would also be strengthened by the fact that he has a child in the UK, which would make it much harder to remove his nationality.
Guidance issued to officials dealing with such cases states that the “consideration of a child’s best interests” is a primary factor they must take into account.
Fattah secured UK nationality through his mother, Laila Soueif, who was born in Britain, which meant he did not have to go through the usual “good character” checks.
He was released from prison in Egypt in September after serving a five-year sentence for spreading “fake news”. He was initially banned from travelling to the UK by the Egyptian government, which refused to recognise his British nationality.
Labour ministers then lobbied Cairo to drop the travel ban, which it eventually did, and Fattah arrived in the country just before Christmas. It is understood that the Foreign Office has now instigated an internal inquiry into the handling of his case by successive governments.
Anger erupted after the emergence of comments Fattah posted on social media site X (then called Twitter) from 2010 to 2012.
As well as calling for the killing of Zionists and labelling Britons “dogs and monkeys”, he urged Londoners to burn Downing Street, told his supporters to kill police and said he hated white people.
In a lengthy statement this week, Fattah said he would be “forever grateful” to people in the UK who called for his release from prison, adding that it was “painful” to see some come to regret their support for him.
He said: “I am shaken that, just as I am being reunited with my family for the first time in 12 years, several historic tweets of mine have been republished and used to question and attack my integrity and values, escalating to calls for the revocation of my citizenship.
“Looking at the tweets now – the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning – I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologise.”
The activist said the remarks were “mostly expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises”, namely the conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. Fattah insisted that some of his posts had been “completely misunderstood, seemingly in bad faith”.
In particular, he appeared to refer to a post from 2010 in which he responded to another user saying God “should subject his anger at good [sic] for creating those dirty homosexual”.
He wrote in his statement this week: “A tweet being shared to allege homophobia on my part was actually ridiculing homophobia. I have paid a steep price for my public support for LGBTQ rights in Egypt and the world.”
Fattah said another post had been “wrongly interpreted to suggest Holocaust denial – but in fact the exchange shows that I was clearly mocking Holocaust denial”.
He added: “Looking back I see the writings of a much younger person, deeply enmeshed in antagonistic online cultures, utilising flippant, shocking and sarcastic tones in the nascent, febrile world of social media.
“But this young man never intended to offend a wider public and was, in the real world, engaged in the non-violent pro-democracy movement and repeatedly incarcerated for calling for full equality, human rights and democracy for all.”
Starmer’s official spokesman said the Prime Minister felt the “fulsome apology” from Fattah was “clearly the right thing to do”. He added: “We have condemned the tweets that he posted some years ago. We’ve made clear that we feel they’re abhorrent in nature.”
Senior Tories, including Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, all previously supported diplomatic efforts to free Fattah after he was jailed for what the Egyptian authorities described as “spreading fake news” about torture in a Facebook post.
At the weekend, Labour and the Conservatives insisted that they had not previously been aware of Fattah’s social media rants, despite his nomination for an EU diplomacy prize being withdrawn in 2014 over tweets calling for the deaths of Israelis.
No 10 revealed that Starmer had been unaware of the views expressed by Fattah when he publicly welcomed him to Britain, where he was set to see his 14-year-old son.
Starmer said on Boxing Day he was “delighted” Fattah was “back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones”. In February, he met Fattah’s mother and pledged to do “all that I can” to secure his release.
The Prime Minister is understood to have been alerted to the “extremist” social media posts only after they began widely circulating online.
Philp told ITV’s Good Morning Britain this week: “Frankly, I’m not really interested in [Mr Fattah’s] apology. What he said was absolutely disgusting. In my view, this man is a scumbag.
“If I was the actual home secretary, I would today be signing an order to revoke his citizenship ... and making sure he gets deported, because people who spew this kind of hatred have no place in this country. He’s clearly making the apology simply because his vile, hateful remarks have been publicly exposed now.”
Fattah was granted British citizenship automatically in 2021 under an immigration law that allows mothers to transmit their UK citizenship to their children, even if they are outside Britain. His mother was born in London while his grandmother was studying in the UK.
Until 2019, applicants using this route were still subject to a “good character” test, which Fattah would probably have failed on extremism grounds, critics said.
But the law was changed after the Supreme Court ruled that the requirement was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) following a legal challenge by David Fenton Bangs, a British-American murderer. The case meant Fattah did not need to sit the test.
Home Office guidance says officials should usually reject applications where the person has expressed “vocal or active” opposition to British values including “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.
The guidance states: “A person who has engaged in unacceptable behaviour will normally be refused British citizenship, unless they have publicly retracted their views and it is clear that they have not re-engaged in such behaviour.”
Fattah also did not have to take the Life in the UK Test, an exam about British history and values that most migrants have to take to secure citizenship.
The row has triggered fresh calls from the Conservatives for Britain to leave the ECHR – a move Labour opposes.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “That membership of the ECHR forced Britain to drop the ‘good character’ test and contributed to allowing this Britain-hating extremist to get citizenship demonstrates once again why we need to leave this broken organisation and set our own laws.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said he regretted his previous support for Fattah, and called on the police to investigate the comments.
Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP who had previously campaigned for Fattah’s release “as a British citizen”, said that she felt “deeply let down and frankly betrayed, having lent my support to his cause, which I now regret”.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “Mr Fattah is a British citizen. It has been a long-standing priority under successive governments to work for his release from detention and to see him reunited with his family in the UK. The government condemns Mr Fattah’s historic tweets and considers them to be abhorrent.”
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