How much effort should a country expend to rescue someone who appears to hate its values? That is the question posed by the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian pro-democracy campaigner who has been in and out of prison since 2006 for opposing the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and for drawing attention to torture and other abuses. In 2021, he was granted British citizenship through a somewhat tenuous connection—his mother, Laila, had been born in London while her mother was studying in the United Kingdom—which gave the British government greater standing to...