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CRIME

Italy-Egypt friendship on line as slain student is buried

As Italy prepared to bury Giulio Regeni on Friday, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi warned Egypt its friendship was on the line over the probe into the student's unexplained death in Cairo.

Published: 12 February 2016 13:41 CET
Italy-Egypt friendship on line as slain student is buried
A tribute in Cairo to murdered student Giulio Regeni. Photo: Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP

Renzi said Egypt was cooperating with Rome's demand that Italian investigators be involved in the investigation into the death of the 28-year-old whose torture-scarred body was discovered dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital on February 3rd.

“For the moment, all our requests have been met and above all we have demanded that every element should be put on the table in order that the truth can be established and those really responsible can be detained,” Renzi told Radio Anch'io.

“This has been a tragic event,” he added.

“I extend my condolences to Giulio's family and I say that we have told the Egyptians: friendship is a precious asset but it is only possible on the basis of truth.”

Regeni, a PhD student at Cambridge University, disappeared on January 25th.

Many Italians believe he was abducted and killed by elements of the Egyptian security services, an allegation the authorities in Cairo have rejected as baseless.

According to media reports, the Italian team in Cairo have questioned an Egyptian national who has testified that he saw a foreigner being bundled into a police van close to Regeni's house around the time he disappeared on January 25th.

Regeni's slaying while he was in Cairo doing research for his doctoral thesis has become a cause celebre amongst academics around the world and has turned the spotlight on what rights and opposition groups say are increasing abuses by security services under the military-backed government in Cairo.

Nearly 5,000 university lecturers and researchers have signed a letter accusing Egypt of using torture against its own citizens and demanding an independent probe into Regeni's death.

Flags were flying at half-mast Friday across the region of Friuli Venezia, where Regeni was due to be laid to rest in his home town of Fiumicello.

Dozens of his friends from around the world have made the journey to northeastern Italy to honour his memory with residents of the little town opening their doors to them.

The family has requested the media to allow the funeral to be conducted in private.

The day Regeni went missing was the fifth anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring uprising which led to the overthrow of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubark.

Police had been deployed across the city to prevent demonstrations.

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POLITICS

Italy’s government proposes bill to make surrogacy a ‘universal crime’

Italy’s parliament is set to debate a bill that would expand criminal penalties for the use of surrogacy, in what opponents say is part of a broader attack on gay rights by the country’s hard-right government.

Published: 22 March 2023 13:29 CET
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.

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