The Londoner: Wife’s thanks for 70,000 backing Karim Ennarah detained human rights worker

Jessica Kelly
23 November 2020

A PETITION to support detained Egyptian human rights worker, Karim Ennarah, who was in the process of moving to London, has reached more than 70,000 signatures, as his film-maker wife tells us she is caught between “waves of hyperactivity... [and] emotion”.  

“If there’s any silver lining,” Jessica Kelly told The Londoner, it is “how many people have come together to fight for Karim”.  

Ennarah was arrested in Egypt last week. Ennarah and his colleagues Gasser Abdel Razek andMohamed Basheer fromm the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), have been accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading false information. He and Kelly, pictured above, married in September and were in the process of securing a spouse visa so that Ennarah could move from Cairo to London.

Kelly, who has  made documentaries featured on the BBC such as Inside the Real Saudi Arabia  and Silicon Valley’s Online Slave Market, said: “I’m really overwhelmed at the amount of support for Karim. I knew he was popular and lovable, but  didn’t realise how much support he has.”

Her change.org petition says that EIPR’s work involves “documenting incidents of sectarian violence and violence against women, and leading research into strengthening economic and social rights”.

Foreign secretary Dominic Raab has raised the matter with his Egyptian counterpart, the Foreign Office said. US Senators including Bernie Sanders have tweeted their support, while Joe Biden’s foreign policy advisor Antony Blinken said "meeting with foreign diplomats is not a crime." Index on Censorship, a British freedom of speech charity, said it was monitoring the situation and Amnesty International have expressed solidarity with those being held. 

Kelly said last night that Ennarah’s hearing had been brought forward to today “which is apparently completely unprecedented... they’re taking it as a good sign”.

Hambling: I was ready for criticism but not couscous

Maggi Hambling
Dave Benett/Getty Images

Mary Wollstonecraft sculptor Maggi Hambling first divided critics when, aged 15, she arrived unannounced at artists Cedric Morris and Lett Haines’s house for feedback on her paintings.  

She told an event how Haines and Morris made entirely “opposite criticisms” of her work,  while Morris enjoyed an “extraordinary” dinner: “Who ate couscous in Southwark in 1960?” Highbrow.

Showing off comes naturally to David Mitchell

Dave Benett/Getty Images

DAVID MITCHELL says his ultimate passion is  showing off. “I came to showing off naturally. I did it for free before I was paid,” the comedian and actor told a Cambridge Literary Festival audience over the weekend. If no one else wrote parts for him  he thinks he would spend his days “writing plays, to put myself in.”

Rupert Everett is trapped in Italy

Dave Benett/Getty Images for Eco

Rupert Everett is “a little bit stuck” in Tuscany. The actor is planning his next film, based on a youthful French exchange trip, from “five miles down a dirt track in a house that’s a bit like Young Frankenstein” because the “travel corridor closed”, he told the BBC. We’re not jealous.

SW1A

Bloomberg via Getty Images

DEPARTED No 10 chief adviser  Dominic Cummings was an “unnerving” presence when running his uncle’s Durham nightclub Klute in a career break just over a decade ago. “‘What do you want?,’ he would ask students ordering at the bar. No expression, this was a transaction,” recalls Frederick Shepherd, student-turned-Tory staffer in The Critic Magazine. Shepherd adds punters were “more afraid of him” than the bouncers. Can Dom now launch a London branch?

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