‘My husband is under house arrest in Cairo’
Forced apart from her Egyptian partner is a ‘soul-destroying way to live’, Jess Kelly tells Rosa Silverman
Jess Kelly dreams of the kind of married life most couples take for granted. To live in the same house as her husband, not on different continents. To travel with him freely. To have a relationship that isn’t conducted via phone messages.
“I want us to be able to plan our future and not be forced apart by something that’s political and potentially out of our control,” she says from her east London flat, where the Egyptian film posters her husband has given her hang on the walls.
But, for more than a year and a half, the Bafta-nominated documentary filmmaker, 34, and Karim Ennarah, 38, have been suspended in a Kafkaesque limbo. Ennarah, a human rights activist, is banned from leaving his native Egypt, where his assets have been frozen. His British wife cannot work in Egypt and can only visit a few times a year, during breaks from her job.
“It’s a very soul-destroying way to live,” says Kelly, whose husband’s plight will be highlighted in a Human Rights Watch report to be published this month. The couple hope this will draw attention to the increased use of travel bans as a means of authoritarian control in a country that Amnesty International said “severely repressed” the rights to freedom of expression and association, as well as targeting human rights defenders and other activists through criminal investigations, unfair prosecutions and inclusion on a “list of terrorists”.
For Kelly, who has made a string of hard-hitting investigative documentaries ranging in subject from political rape cases in India to torture and child abuse in Islamic schools in Sudan, and whose work has aired on the BBC and Channel 4, the political has been personal.
After growing up in London and Wiltshire, she met Ennarah in Egypt in 2009, during her year abroad while studying Arabic at Oxford University. She was drawn to his energy and curiosity, his sense of humour and his “incredible mind”. A sociable young man, he was always surrounded by friends and would linger with them for hours, chatting away. “He’s a real Anglophile, so we would talk about British politics or football,” says Kelly. “He used to be teased as a kid because he supported the England team when it was uncool in Egypt to do that.”
The pair were friends for a long time before they got together in the mid-2000s. Ennarah, who has joined our video call from the home he lives in, alone, in Cairo, was working for a respected human rights organisation, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), so the couple grew used to the hardships of a long-distance relationship. The only respite came while he was studying for his master’s at SOAS University in London not long after they got together, as a Foreign Office-funded Chevening Scholar. “That was the only time we got to live together,” says Kelly.
When they were spending time together, the couple would often hang out in cafes, drinking coffee. Today, Kelly sends her husband a picture every time she visits their favourite one. Their relationship plays out not across a table, but via the exchange of messages throughout the day.
They tell each other what they are eating or watching on TV, “so as to not feel totally alone”, and send each other photos of their morning coffee, in an effort to share their quotidien pleasures despite the distance between them.
In her idle moments, Kelly flicks through photos of her husband on her phone: seeking out happier times when the two of them could meet wherever they wished.
It was never meant to be the way it is now. In summer 2020, when they married in Cairo in a small, low-key ceremony, they’d planned to celebrate properly, with a bigger UK wedding at a later date. Ennarah obtained a visa and was to come to London and move in with Kelly. “I was really tired and jaded after 10 years of doing this work and was looking to do something else and be a bit more settled,” he says.
They were both looking forward to living like a married couple. The Egyptian authorities, however, had other ideas. Amid a crackdown on human rights workers, Ennarah – who was by then director of the EIPR’s criminal justice unit – was arrested while on holiday in South Sinai in November 2020.
Realising what was about to happen, he had already warned his wife. “I had to tell her the truth, that eventually I’ll be arrested and it could be a couple of months or a couple of years before we’re together again,” he admits.
He was on the beach shortly afterwards when plain-clothes policemen turned up. Accused of links with a terror group, he was thrown into prison in Cairo and held in isolation.
“It was actually perhaps more horrific to have the prior warning,” Kelly reflects. “We had this window where I’d keep checking if Karim was still there and we’d keep speaking but it felt like we were on borrowed time and it was very scary.”
After he stopped replying to her messages, she learned, from one of his friends, that Ennarah had been jailed. “[I suffered] a very physical reaction, like I’d been struck down,” says Kelly. “I was cycling and had to stop and put my bike down in the street and I burst into tears. Someone passing asked if he could help and I remember thinking: ‘how do I explain what’s just happened?’”
Friends and family rallied around, as did various celebrities. Scarlett Johansson, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Joseph Fiennes and Bill Nighy all lent their support to Ennarah, as well as his colleagues Gasser Abdel-Razek and Mohammed Bashir, who had been incarcerated with him and live under the same restrictions as him today.
No doubt aided by the A-list actors’ involvement, their story made international headlines. “We had this idea about how we get maximum attention and it was Karim’s birthday while he was in prison, so we decided to try and get celebrities to send him a birthday message, reaching them through personal contacts or in any way possible,” explains Kelly.
The British Government also lobbied on their behalf. Sitting in his cell and entirely cut off from the world, Ennarah knew none of this. When, just two weeks later, he and his colleagues were released, he was “thunderstruck”. “First thing I did was get hold of a phone and call Jess,” says Ennarah. At first, they were too full of emotion to say much. “It was amazing to hear his voice again,” adds Kelly.
But their ordeal was far from over. Five days later, Ennarah attempted to board a flight to London but was denied permission to leave the country. On top of that, a court froze his and his colleagues’ assets. “The situation I’m in today is unique because it’s open-ended and really damaging, but difficult to speak up about,” Ennarah says.
Kelly spends much of her time trying to secure her husband’s liberation, including by lobbying the British Government. She would like to see them apply more pressure on their Egyptian counterparts.
“I think a stronger line is needed,” she says. “The Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, is due to meet Egypt’s foreign minister in London in a few days. She could make a real difference by raising Karim’s case and pressing for these travel bans to be overturned, so we can be reunited with our families.”
It’s a message echoed by Nighy, one of their celebrity supporters. “Jess and Karim have been separated for over a year and a half and it’s had devastating consequences on their lives,” he says. “I hope Britain can now use its close links with Egypt to bring their dreadful and unnecessary situation to an end.
“It’s confusing that a country with as distinguished a history as Egypt, and which is this year hosting the COP27 UN climate change conference, can be at the forefront of an enlightened discussion about all our futures and still be regressively persecuting someone as decent and honourable as Karim.”
Oscillating between hope and despair, Kelly’s daily life in London is consumed by the absence at the heart of it. “It occupies most of my mind all of the time,” she says. “I wake up in the morning and always get a feeling of dread or uncertainty remembering we’re still in this situation and Karim’s not there next to me.”
Sometimes their constant messaging becomes too painful, serving as an unceasing reminder of the difficulties they face. “I can’t plan any future,” says Kelly. “I don’t know when me and Karim will be able to live together and it’s hard to enjoy anything.
“It’s exhausting, and although everyone’s very supportive, there comes a point where there’s nothing that friends and family can say to make you feel better,” she adds. “And it gets kind of normalised [for them], while for us it gets worse. But you can’t keep saying: ‘I’m suffering so much’.”
She and her husband cannot even think about whether they’d want to have children. “It’s not something we could fit into our lives currently, and it’s very hard because this is exactly the time when other people are settling down,” she says.
Ennarah, who has worked to draw attention to the surge in death penalties in his country, hopes their plight will not be in vain; that they can use the awareness around his case, as well as other cases, to help build some momentum towards “even a small opening up of Egyptian civic space”.
And Kelly agrees: “The mental toll, uncertainty and helplessness of living under a travel ban and bank freeze like Karim’s extends to family members – it’s not just me as a foreigner whose life is being throttled. I hope that is something that comes to light.”
‘I wake up and get a feeling of dread that we’re still in this situation and Karim is not there next to me’