Rigged Justice: Laila Soueif’s hunger strike is a feminist call to arms

June 12, 2025HubMP2012

Janey Starling explains why Laila Soueif’s hunger strike to release her son imprisoned in Egypt raises broader questions about dehumanising incarceration, including in Britain.

Dr Laila Soueif’s hunger strike to demand the release of her son, British-Egyptian writer and political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fatteh, is not just an act of protest. It is a reclamation of her dignity and rights as a mother — two things that prisons universally strip from prisoners and their families all over the world.

In the U.K., I run the ‘No Births Behind Bars’ campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women. Every week, our prison system tears children from their mothers. Prison cuts through the maternal bonds mothers have with their infants, bonds that form the very foundations of human life itself. Prisons destroy all that it means to love and raise your children in safety – all in the name of ‘justice’.

Dr Laila is fighting for justice – but not the legal kind. Something far bigger and far more fundamental: reproductive justice. Reproductive justice is about a woman’s right to have – or not have – children and to raise those children in safe and loving conditions. Speaking to the BBC, Laila has said that her hunger strike – which has now surpassed 250 days – is driven by her desire to get “all my children and grandchildren’s lives back on track.”

Protest often requires us to put our bodies directly on the line. But Laila’s chosen strategy of a hunger strike enables her to reclaim the bodily dignity that has been denied to her by two governments: the Egyptian regime with its pointless, apparently endless, incarceration of her son, and the British government, with its staunch indifference to Alaa’s detention. 

Hunger strike as an act of dignity is something Alaa himself wrote about in 2014, in the context of his own prison hunger strike. In his words: “There’s no dignity for a body deprived of the embrace of its loved ones.”

And this is what Laila’s hunger strike brings into focus: the dehumanisation and indignity of incarceration, not just for the person incarcerated, but their entire family. And in this case, not just by one carceral state, but two: both Britain and Egypt.

Globally, mothers are always on the frontline of the fight against prisons. When their children are in prison, it is always mothers and grandmothers who keep the home fires burning, take on the care of their grandchildren and fight like tigers for their children’s release from the state’s claws.

In the UK, mothers have spearheaded the national campaign against the barbaric Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentencing scheme, which has left thousands languishing inside prisons on indefinite sentences. Shirley DeBono, whose son Shaun was jailed for 2.5 years for stealing a phone yet ended up serving over ten years in English prisons with a never-ending set of extensions to his sentence, has tirelessly kept the IPP scandal in the national spotlight. IPP sentences, which operate in a way not dissimilar to how Alaa is being treated in Egypt, are now declared by UN experts as a form of torture. Without Shirley’s commitment to her son’s liberation, it would likely still be buried in the shadows of our justice system. 

It’s also mothers who are campaigning against Britain’s ghastly joint enterprise laws that send people to prison for murders they never committed, solely because they were present at the scene. Jan Cunliffe, whose 15-year-old, blind son was given a life sentence for a murder someone else admitted to, co-founded the campaign group JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association) along with another mother, Gloria Morrison, whose son’s best friend is also serving a life sentence under these laws. Writing about their decision in the Guardian, Jan said: “We could both see that the justice system was rigged.”

Dr Laila knows how rigged systems operate. She also knows that once a family becomes ensnared in the grinding, monolithic machinery of the criminal legal system, there is no fast way out and there will be no justice by the state’s mechanisms. The British state has left Alaa to languish in prison for over a decade now, not unlike the thousands of IPP prisoners in English jails. And in her love and her tenacity, Laila is indirectly united with Shirley, Jan and the countless other mothers fighting for their children’s release from the cages they have been locked in. Laila’s campaign for her son’s release is done in pursuit of what it truly means to live, and love – the two things that prisons are designed to disrupt and destroy. 

And on the other side, these mothers all share a common target: David Lammy. Lammy, while in opposition, decried each of the respective injustices they faced at the hands of carceral systems but, now in power, pretends as though he is powerless to act on any of them. 

When he was Shadow Justice Secretary, David Lammy promised that Labour would reform the “shoddy, outdated” joint enterprise laws. Lammy also labelled IPP sentences “cruel” and called for a cross-party effort to take responsibility for the issue. Now in power, his government has not changed either of these gross injustices.

 Similarly, when Lammy was Shadow Foreign Secretary, he was a strong supporter of the campaign for Alaa’s release. In 2022, Lammy called for the Foreign Office to leverage the UK’s £4bn trading partnership with Egypt to secure Alaa’s freedom. Now, Lammy is the Foreign Secretary, and it is firmly within his power to deliver on his own words and suspend trade until Alaa is released. 

Labour’s commitment to Alaa’s release must now move from diplomacy to disruption. We know that Keir Starmer has directly asked President El-Sisi to release Alaa over the phone, but to no avail. The UK is the largest single foreign investor in Egypt and holds a unique power to force Sisi’s hand. A suspension of trade and arms supply to Egypt is a surefire way to secure Alaa’s release.

There can be no further delay. Laila has already lost almost half of her body weight and doctors say her survival to this point “defies all medical explanation”. A trade and arms embargo should have already happened weeks ago – and all Labour MPs should be fighting for it to start today.

Like all mothers fighting against the cruelty of incarceration, Laila Soueif’s love for her son is stronger than the state’s iron fist. Now emaciated in her hospital bed at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, she is a stone’s throw from Westminster, the epicentre of the British political system. Keir Starmer and David Lammy cannot continue to turn their backs on her by paying lip service alone. It is within their power to suspend Britain’s trade with Egypt. In doing so, they will free not just Alaa, but Laila too. 

Janey Starling is co-director of feminist campaign organisation Level Up, which leads the national campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.

 Image: Laila Soueif, c/o her daughter, Sanaa.