Shame on those who try to justify Giulio Regeni’s assassination

Press Association/AP/Amr Nabil. All rights reserved.Several articles in the Italian press – by journalists and others with
no experience or knowledge of research in the Middle East – have suggested that
Giulio Regeni’s supervisors bear responsibility for sending him into a
dangerous situation, alleging that they knew that it would put his life at
risk. These are preposterous claims and those who make them are both
irresponsible and despicable.

They are irresponsible because one does not
make such a serious accusation – of having deliberately sent someone to death –
without having full knowledge of the situation and holding irrefutable proofs.
And even if you believe that you hold such proofs – if you are not part of a
lynch mob, but a person who respects the basic tenet of justice under the rule
of law according to which everyone is innocent until proven guilty – you raise
questions instead of making straightforward accusations, as long as guilt has not
been officially established.

The accusers are despicable as well because
they lack a sense of human empathy. They don’t take into account the feelings
of supervisors confronted with the massive tragedy of the loss of their student,
a person whom they have known well and with whom they have had long hours of exchanges
over several years. Instead, they accuse the supervisors of bearing responsibility
for the murder. In doing so, they act like journalists who publicly accuse
parents of being responsible for the death of their child when they have no
real clue about it and no guilt has been established in any way.

In the specific case of Giulio Regeni, the
accusatory behaviour is all the more irresponsible and despicable since it is
based on a total ignorance of research conditions in Egypt and Giulio Regeni’s research
in particular. I happen to have known Giulio personally: after finishing his master’s
degree at Cambridge, he contacted me in 2012 to prepare his PhD under my
supervision. We exchanged emails and had talks about his research proposal.
Giulio wanted to study the new independent labour movement in Egypt. I found
this to be a perfectly reasonable project on which he already had good
knowledge. He submitted a PhD application to my university requesting me as
supervisor, and I accepted it.

That was in early 2013. In June of that same
year, Giulio wrote me that he had not been able to secure funding for his PhD studies,
and had to give them up temporarily. He was writing from Cairo, where he worked
with the Ministry of Industry together with UNIDO, the United Nations
Industrial Development Organization. Giulio was not “sent” to Egypt into an
unknown land to do research assigned to him by some supervisor, as so many cheap
journalistic comments claimed, but was determined to conduct research on a
topic on which he had already accumulated findings, in a country with which he
was quite familiar, and where he had lived for some time before he finally registered
for a PhD in 2014, back at Cambridge, his alma mater.

I personally know several other students in
various universities who have worked or are presently working on PhD theses on
the topic of the Egyptian labour movement. That is to say that there was
absolutely nothing extraordinary in Giulo Regeni’s research. It was not like,
for example, wanting to undertake research on ISIS in ISIS-controlled
territory! Add to this that supervisors’ relationships with PhD students are
those of academic advisors to adult researchers, not those of school teachers
to teenagers who need authorisation from their parents in order to take part in
a school trip. Supervisors moreover do not control their students’ movements by
locating them permanently through their smartphones! So whatever the
circumstances under which Giulio was assassinated, it is completely outrageous
to blame his supervisors for his murder.

Moreover, since Giulio was an intelligent 27-year
old young man, such accusations boil down to putting the blame for his
assassination on no one but himself. If Giulio had knowingly and willingly been
risking his life, even if he was asked to do so by others, this would mean that,
as an adult, he bears responsibility for his own death. This is a classic case
of victim-blaming. I have read unbelievable statements in the Italian press by people
who ignore everything about Giulio’s research topic and make claims that could
have been issued directly by the Egyptian security services.

This is shameful. The spectacle of representatives
of European governments acting as unscrupulous salesmen queuing to pay visits
to dictators is disgusting enough. Instead of contributing to exculpating the
same dictatorships, European journalists ought better to uphold the values of
freedom, democracy and justice on which Europe claims to be based.

This
article was first published in Italian on ilsole24ore.com.