THE torture and murder in Egypt of an Italian Cambridge University PhD student will be among the subjects for discussion during a two-week world justice festival that gets under way in Edinburgh today.
Giulio Regeni’s mutilated and half-naked corpse was found in a ditch beside the main road between Cairo and Alexandria in February 2016. The 28-year-old was in Egypt studying the country’s independent trade unions.
Among the speakers will be Carlo Bonini and Giuliano Foschini, the makers of 9 Days in Cairo, a film about the case, as well as reporters from La Repubblica and human rights activists Saeb Kasm and Hugh Sandman.
Festival co-ordinator Harriet Fildes said: “I would have imagined Giulio Regeni’s murder should have stimulated a widespread demand on the government to fulfil its responsibility and take a greater role in the Italian-Egyptian joint investigation, as well as more broadly, a stronger stance against human rights abuses in Egypt through the use of coercive diplomacy, limiting or discontinuing diplomatic ties and most importantly, security, intelligence and military relations.
“Both the academic community and the government have the duty to press this issue further. Instead, we continue to sell arms to a regime that has shown its impunity – its disregard for human rights, and academic freedom – in the most brutal of ways, in the torture and murder of an international student.”
Other speakers at the free festival events include South African novelist and journalist Margie Orford who was imprisoned by the apartheid regime in the 1980s; renowned anti-corruption campaigner Andrew Feinstein; Nobel Peace Prize nominee and West Papuan independence leader Benny Wenda; and former sweatshop factory manager Vishwaraj Maghoo, who now runs a Fairtrade clothing company in Mauritius.
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