Egypt’s revenge, Zaki was sentenced to three years in prison

After 42 months and countless hearing postponements, the story of Patrick George Zaki, an Egyptian researcher at the University of Bologna, who was arrested in Cairo in February 2020 on charges of “false news” and “assaulting national security.”

It all begins at the end of the first semester of exams at his alma mater Studiorum, when Zaki, enrolled in the European master’s degree Gemma in Gender Studies, decides to take a short family vacation in Mansoura, a town in the north of the country. He could never have imagined that waiting for him at the airport was a warrant for the arrest of an article published in Arabic on a stairway gate, in which he recounted how an Egyptian Copt spends a week amid threats and violence. An act that amounts, according to the new anti-terrorism laws enacted by Egypt, to the crime of spreading false news in the country and abroad that harms national security. That was on February 7, 2020.

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As stated by the human rights NGO with which Zaki cooperated, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (Eber), a few hours after the verdict was issued, agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) took him blindfolded from the hospital on February 7, 2020. Cairo at the airport to take him back to Mansoura Where he was interrogated and tortured. On that day, as Eber still recalls, in addition to threats and beatings, agents also resorted to electroconvulsive therapy to obtain more information about his activity.

But Zaki and his lawyer have to wait more than a year to find out the real charges, while the pretrial detention is mechanically renewed every 45 days, and at a certain point the doors of Cairo’s Tora maximum security prison open. widely to the world. Then, in December 2021, for no apparent reason, the release. However, the charges have not been dropped, and the travel ban is burdening Zaki, which prevents him from returning to Bologna to complete his studies, despite the growing international calls to ensure freedom of study and freedom of expression.

Indeed, Zaki’s case drew the attention of the academic and political world, not only in Italy, but also in Europe, to the case of the student and more generally to that government that came to power with the 2013 coup he led. By current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whom many have accused of criminalizing any form of dissent.

Talking about Zaki means paying attention to enforced disappearances, torture and arrests by the police and agents of the National Security Agency. The Rome Prosecutor’s Office even identified four secret intelligence officials as the perpetrators of the murder of the Friuli researcher Giulio Regeni, in 2016. However, the process has stalled, and can never begin, because the tracking of the four people has stopped. Lost pre-trial detention. said Giorgio Caracciolo, a researcher at the Danish Institute Against Torture (Alkarama) who closely follows the human rights situation in Egypt as well as the Zaki and Regeni cases. Two court cases “are intertwined – as he says – because the regime is responsible for them through the National Security Agency.” Attention, Caracciolo, which may have been the reason for his expulsion from Egypt last November, when “as soon as I landed at the Cairo airport, NSA agents canceled my visa to pursue Cop27 work on the Sharm el-Sheikh climate.”

About Zaki’s sentence – which can only serve 14 months in prison out of 36, counting 22 already spent behind bars – Caracciolo speaks of “shame”. “Instead of guaranteeing the rights of the victim of torture, more violations were added: Patrick – explains the expert – he was arrested immediately despite the fact that the sentences handed down by emergency courts, which cannot be appealed, await the approval of the President of the Republic, who also has the power to issue pardons ” . The amnesty which is now being invoked but, should it arrive, will be attributed to “front operations” in which, according to Caracciolo, “there is no real desire to improve the human rights situation in Egypt”.

Dyer Agency