FIFTEEN Nobel Prize laureates have called on world leaders attending the upcoming Cop27 climate conference in Egypt “not to forget about the thousands of political prisoners” languishing inside the country’s jails.

The 27th United Nations Climate Change conference, which is sponsored by Coca-Cola and a host of other corporate entities this year, is due to take place in the Red Sea town of Sharm el-Sheikh this Sunday.

The conference this year has attracted criticism due to the awful human rights record of the host nation, where thousands of activists, journalists, students, opposition politicians and others have been arbitrarily detained and tried in military courts for criticism of the government.

One such political prisoner is the Egyptian-British activist and writer Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a prominent critic of the country’s former dictator Hosni Mubarak and current authoritarian ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Mr Abdel-Fattah has spent most of the past decade behind bars and has been on a partial hunger strike for the past six months.

His family announced on Tuesday that he has now begun a full hunger strike and will stop drinking water on the first day of Cop27.

“As Nobel laureates, we believe in the world-changing power of words and the need to defend them if we are to build a more sustainable, genuinely fairer future,” reads the open letter published today by Mr Abdel-Fattah’s Italian publishers.

“We urge all representatives of governments, environmental groups and businesses to use the means at their disposal to help those most vulnerable, not just to the rising seas, but to the imprisoned and forgotten.

“A just transition cannot solely be concerned with bringing down emissions, but must be a transition away from exploitation and coercion.

“We believe that it is through more democracy, more transparency and more civic participation that the truest route to sustainability lies.

“We ask everyone support the call from Egyptian and international human rights groups for a prisoner amnesty.”

Among the letter’s signatories are Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich, South African-Australian novelist John Maxwell Coetzee, English writer Kazuo Ishiguro and Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.

The full letter can be found at mstar.link/Cop27OpenLetter.