Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what representations he has made to his Egyptian counterpart on releasing prisoner of conscience Rami Kamil due to the risk of covid-19 to detainees in overcrowded prisons.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials have raised the case of Ramy Kamil with the Egyptian authorities. We also regularly raise the broad issue of prison conditions in Egypt: improving them was one of the specific recommendations we made in our intervention at Egypt's Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last year. Encouragingly, the Egyptian Government has accepted our recommendation, which we are following up. In addition, we are speaking to partners about supporting practical projects to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in prisons.