On a grey afternoon in the capital, four Egyptian intelligence officers were sentenced in absentia for the abduction, torture, and murder of Giulio Regeni.
For ten years, the Italian state, Giulio’s family, and human rights investigators have navigated a complex maze of institutional obstacles, diplomatic indifference, and government silence to uncover and reveal even a small part of the truth publicly.
The ruling is a monument to the relentless tenacity of Giulio’s parents, Paola and Claudio Regeni, and their legal counsel.
As the courtroom clears and news banners pass, we are haunted by the question: is this legal resolution the nearest we will come to closure?
The last ten years have made me obsessed with the idea of closure—both how to achieve it and, at the same time, whether it even exists.
I found myself using demarcations of time: ten years since Raba’a (the massacre in 2013, which got me into trouble because I called it a massacre), five years since my viva, ten — and then suddenly fifteen, out of nowhere — years since 2011.
I even got as close to woo-woo as I allow myself when reading about the idea of seven-year cycles.
Maybe this is it. Today. I was always drawn to law for the finality it offers. A court case doesn’t change the inner world directly, but it draws a distinct line. It presents a binary: did this thing happen or not, and did it lead to that other thing or not?
Legally, the verdict creates an indisputable record confirming that a 28-year-old doctoral student from Cambridge University was specifically targeted, monitored, subjected to torture over multiple days, and ultimately killed by agents of Egypt’s internal security forces.
However, judicial truth and existential closure exist in separate spheres. When government officials kill an academic for questioning, sentence them in absentia, and stay protected within a dictatorship still receiving billions in Western economic and military aid, closure turns into a mere political illusion.
The perpetrators walk the streets of Cairo. The regime that authorised their atmosphere of impunity remains in place, and Giulio Regeni remains dead.
The Aftermath of the Revolution
For many of us who lived, worked, and wrote about the region during the long sunrise of the Arab Spring and its subsequent dark descent, Giulio’s murder in early 2016 marked a decisive, shattering threshold.
For many, it marked the true end of the revolution—not because Giulio’s life was more valuable than the thousands of Egyptians who had been killed, disappeared, or imprisoned by the Sisi regime, but because his death symbolized the widening scope of totalitarian violence.
It is important to clarify this because Western commentary often emphasises European perspectives while ignoring the widespread suffering in Egypt after the 2013 counter-revolution.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians—activists, journalists, lawyers, ordinary people, and students—have been detained in Egypt’s prison system. Their names seldom appear in European headlines; their families rarely receive attention on European political stages.
Mentioning Giulio’s death as a conclusion risks reinforcing a hierarchy of grief, placing a European researcher above the countless local victims whose pain shaped the military regime’s actions.
Yet Giulio’s murder carried a specific, structural terror.
Giulio Regeni pursued a genuinely pure goal: independent, empirical research on socio-legal issues. His work centred on independent trade unions—the daily organisation of street vendors in Cairo striving for dignity and economic stability. He practised what doctoral scholars are taught: listening carefully, documenting events, and analysing social dynamics from the perspective of those experiencing them.
When a regime regards even the diligent questioning of a young scholar with a notebook as an existential threat worth destroying physically, the fundamental rules of intellectual life are radically altered.
The Egyptian government had indicated that academic freedom was not just limited by state censorship or visa issues; it was now at risk of immediate suppression. Academics, researchers, and fieldworkers were no longer just bystanders; conducting inquiry was considered an act of subversion.
The Swimming Underwater Years
For those of us working in academic research and socio-legal studies at that exact moment, the news of Giulio’s disappearance and the subsequent revelation of his torture hit with a physical force.
I completed my own doctorate in the summer of 2016, just months after Giulio was killed. That summer, which should have been marked by the satisfaction of finishing years of sustained research, felt completely drained of meaning.
Moving forward into an academic career—attending conferences, pitching research proposals, applying for fellowships, navigating the polite bureaucracy of higher education—felt bizarre, almost indecent.
How could one sit in institutional seminars discussing legal theory or human rights methodologies when a colleague had just been tortured to death for engaging in that exact work?
The ten years since have felt, for me, like a strange, disorienting experience of swimming underwater—a prolonged, suspended half-life. The sense of forward momentum that usually characterises post-doctoral intellectual life dissolved into static.
That disorientation was only compounded when my own doctoral thesis was dragged into its own institutional quagmire in 2019.
Because my research touched upon sensitive political and socio-legal dynamics, the thesis was placed under a safety embargo to protect interviewees and field contacts.
Yet in the vacuum of institutional silence, rumours began to circulate within academic networks that I had not completed the degree, or that something improper had occurred.
Carrying the weight of a painful safety embargo while hearing whispered assertions that your work does not exist creates a peculiar kind of psychological fatigue.
It leaves you feeling doubly displaced: unable to celebrate the completion of your work out of concern for field safety, and simultaneously erased by the institution you worked to serve.
The intellectual world, which once promised a space for truth-seeking, began to feel like a cold terrain of risk management and whispered liabilities.
Institutional Accountability and Cambridge University
As we reflect on the Rome ruling, the focus naturally falls upon the Egyptian state apparatus and the four individuals sentenced today. But state violence does not occur in an institutional vacuum.
Western academic institutions that send young researchers into high-risk environments must also conduct a rigorous, uncomfortable accounting.
Cambridge University—where Giulio Regeni was enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies—needs to undertake a genuine, transparent process of institutional reflection.
Thus far, the university’s response over the past decade has too often mirrored the defensive self-preservation typical of elite higher education institutions.
As in broader discussions of institutional duty of care, exemplified by the case of the late Professor Jason Arday and general critiques of institutional culture, elite universities have persistently resisted admitting structural issues.
The primary moral and criminal fault for Giulio Regeni’s murder lies squarely with the Egyptian security services.
However, Cambridge University, along with the broader higher education sector, cannot avoid questions about its duty of care. Academic institutions often treat risk assessments as bureaucratic compliance exercises rather than dynamic, ongoing safety frameworks.
Furthermore, doctoral supervisors and department heads must have realistic, up-to-date knowledge of the security environments in which their students operate, particularly in hyper-authoritarian regimes where everyday topics such as trade unionism are treated as national security threats.
This is compounded by the enormous implicit pressure on early-career researchers to secure high-impact, original field data to survive an increasingly competitive academic job market, which sometimes leads them to push boundaries without adequate institutional support.
While no institutional protocol can entirely eliminate the hazard of an unhinged authoritarian state, elite universities have a profound moral obligation to ensure that young scholars are not dispatched into volatile environments with little more than an ethics approval form and a list of readings.
Protecting the Scholars of Tomorrow
If we are to honour Giulio Regeni’s memory in any meaningful sense beyond courtroom speeches and solemn press releases, we must build concrete, binding mechanisms to protect researchers working in high-risk zones.
Academic freedom cannot remain an abstract theoretical value celebrated in university charters while early-career researchers are left entirely exposed in the field.
To begin with, fieldwork protocols in high-risk areas should be reviewed not only by departmental committees concerned with institutional liability but also by independent experts who possess in-depth, localised knowledge of the political and intelligence environments.
Universities should also create quick-response crisis protocols for situations where a researcher is detained, questioned, or becomes unresponsive in the field. These protocols must guarantee immediate legal support and diplomatic action, instead of relying on backchannel processes.
At the same time, the higher education sector must address the structural pressure on PhD students to undertake high-risk research to stand out in a hyper-competitive job market, valuing methodological safety over sensational access.
Early-career scholars conducting qualitative socio-legal research should undergo rigorous operational security training, including encrypted communications, data minimisation, and protocols for protecting research participants.
Finally, entities within the higher education sector must implement clear, standardised protections for scholars with safety-based embargoed theses.
These safeguards should prevent safety-based embargoes from being weaponised, misinterpreted, or utilised to harm a scholar’s professional reputation and qualification records.
Beyond the Courtroom
Last week’s ruling in Rome offers crucial legal clarity. Four individuals have been documented in judicial history as the torturers of a talented young man.
But as the headlines subside and the legal proceedings conclude, the persistent loss remains.
Giulio Regeni’s family, colleagues, and an entire generation of scholars, whose trust in the world was shattered in winter 2016, cannot simply return to normal. The ruling provides a version of truth, but it cannot restore what was lost.
The best course of action—our only meaningful option—is to reject the comfort of quick closure, demand that universities fulfil their duty of care, and make sure no future scholar faces the darkness alone.
Photograph courtesy of Alisdare Hickson. Published under a Creative Commons license.
