A Verdict Abroad, and the Limits of What It Can Settle

On Monday an Italian court convicted three Egyptian security agents in absentia and sentenced them to ten years for the 2016 abduction of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge doctoral researcher who disappeared in Cairo and whose body was found on a roadside outside the city, bearing marks of prolonged torture. The New York Times noted that the verdict followed a decade of effort in Italy to account for the killing. Al Jazeera recorded the same fact, with the same word — in absentia — doing the heavy lifting in both dispatches.

We dwell on that phrase because it carries the whole weight of the story. A sentence handed down to defendants who were not in the room, in a case whose central question — on whose orders a young man was taken — remains unanswered by any authority with the power to answer it. The court has done what a court can do. What only diplomacy can do, it has not done, and the foreign coverage is candid that the two are not the same thing.

There is a particular Italian discipline in this: the long, unglamorous insistence that a death be named, filed, argued and judged, even when the judgment cannot be executed. Foreign correspondents tend to read such persistence as either admirable stubbornness or provincial futility, depending on the week. It is neither, exactly. It is the behaviour of a country that has learned, repeatedly, that the alternative to an imperfect legal record is no record at all.

The world will file this under the familiar heading of Italy and the Mediterranean's southern shore — migration, energy, intelligence, the unquiet border. That framing is not wrong. But the Regeni case is also a story about what a mid-sized European state can and cannot extract from a relationship it cannot afford to sever. The verdict is a sentence. It is not a reckoning, and the distinction is the story.