Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

CRIME

Egypt rejects police role in brutal death of Italian student

Egypt's Interior Minister on Monday rejected charges of security forces involvement in the case of Italian Giulio Regeni, who was found dead bearing signs of torture after disappearing in Cairo last month.

Published: 9 February 2016 08:21 CET

Egypt rejects police role in brutal death of Italian student

Egypt Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar at a press conference on Monday. Photo: Mostafa Abulez/AFP

“This did not happen,” Magdy Abdel Ghaffar said at a press conference when a reporter asked if Regeni, a Cambridge University PhD student, had been arrested by the police.

“It is completely unacceptable that such accusations be directed” at the interior ministry, he said.

“This is not Egyptian security policy – Egyptian security has never been accused of such a matter.”

The ministry has been accused by critics in Egypt of using excessive force, and several policemen are being tried for torture-related deaths.

The ministry says these are isolated cases.

Regeni disappeared on January 25th and was found dead on February 3rd in a ditch in a Cairo suburb.

An Italian autopsy after his remains were repatriated at the weekend concluded that he was killed by a violent blow to the base of the skull having already suffered multiple fractures all over his body.

Rights activists and several opposition groups say Regeni, who was doing research on Egyptian trade union movements, had been arrested by the police and tortured.

The diplomatic community and the Italian media have also raised the possibility of torture.

Abdel Ghaffar said Regeni had not been arrested, and his death was “certainly a criminal act”.

He said no suspects have yet been arrested.

“We are still in the phase of information gathering. This matter needs some time,” he said.

Global rights groups have regularly denounced mysterious disappearances of activists, torture and beating of detainees in Egyptian detention centres.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has himself urged security forces to restrain themselves after several cases of custodial deaths emerged in recent months.

Regeni went missing in central Cairo while on the way to meet a friend on January 25th, the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising against longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

On the anniversary Cairo was quiet, with police deployed across the capital to prevent any demonstrations.

Italy's government proposes bill to make surrogacy a 'universal crime'

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is lead signatory on the new bill, which would make surrogacy – already a crime in Italy – a criminal act for Italians who make use of the practice anywhere in the world.

The motion combines previous draft laws from the ruling Brothers of Italy, Forza Italia and League parties, and will be debated in the lower house from Wednesday, according to news agency Ansa.

The move comes days after the government ordered the city of Milan to stop issuing birth certificates to the children of same-sex couples on the grounds that the practice violates Italian law.

READ ALSO: Milan stops recognising children born to same-sex couples

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has long been outspoken against surrogacy, which she has described as “a commodification of women’s bodies and of human life.”

In a heated parliamentary debate on the rights of same sex couples on Monday, her Brothers of Italy colleague Federico Mollicone, chair of the lower house’s Culture Committee, said surrogacy was “more serious than paedophilia.”

Similar comments were made in 2017 by a minister of the now-defunct New Centre Right party, who likened entering into a surrogacy arrangement to committing a sex crime.

READ ALSO: ‘Surrogacy is like a sex crime’: Italy minister

In early 2022, as leader of the Brothers of Italy party in opposition to Mario Draghi’s coalition government, Meloni put forward the same motion to make surrogacy a “universal crime”.

The text was adopted by the Justice Committee of the former legislature – a preliminary step before it can be debated in the lower house – last April, but did not go further at the time.

The crime of surrogacy in Italy is currently punishable with a prison sentence of over three years or a fine of between 600,000 and one million euros; penalties that the government is proposing to extend to all Italian citizens who engage in the practice, regardless of where it occurs.

Whether such a law would even be possible to pass or enforce is unclear, and legal experts have dismissed it as impractical.

“There are no conditions that would justify an expansion of penal intervention of this type,” Marco Pelissero, a professor of criminal law at the University of Turin, told L’Espresso newspaper.

The idea of a universal crime “does not even exist in the legal language,” he said.

But the proposal has aroused fears that, if passed, the law could result in large numbers of same-sex parents whose children were born via surrogates being sent to prison.

“With this law we would be exposing families with young children to criminal law, quite simply criminalising procreative choices made abroad in countries where these practices are regulated,” Angelo Schillaci, a professor of Comparative Public Law at La Sapienza University, told the news site Fanpage.

‘We are aware of how hard this government is working to strip even the most basic rights from same-sex-parent families,” Alessia Crocini, head of the Rainbow Families organisation, said last week when it was first announced that Milan had been banned from registering the children of gay couples.

The move resulted in large-scale protests across the city on Saturday, and Milan Mayor Beppe Sala has pledged to fight the change.

“It is an obvious step backwards from a political and social point of view,” he said in a recent podcast interview.

On Tuesday, European Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders commented that European Union member states are required by EU law to recognise the children of same-sex couples.

“In line with the LGBTIQ equality strategy for 2020-2025, the Commission is in continuous dialogue with Member States regarding the implementation of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union.”

“This also includes the obligation for Member States to recognise” children “of same-sex parents, for the purpose of exercising the rights conferred by the EU”, Reynders reportedly said in response to question about the developments in Milan.

Url copied to clipboard!