On Monday, a court in Rome found three Egyptian security officials guilty of the aggravated kidnapping of Giulio Regeni, the Italian doctoral student who disappeared in Cairo in 2016 and was later found dead, showing signs of torture. Each man was sentenced to 10 years in prison. A fourth defendant was acquitted, and a murder charge was dismissed, according to reports from the courtroom. Al Jazeera’s account of the verdict — the story ran under Reuters’ byline — noted that the defendants were tried in absentia and are “unlikely to face extradition given the strained relations between Italy and Egypt as a result of the case.”
Let that last part sit for a second, because it is the whole story in miniature. Italy has now done everything its justice system can do: identify the alleged kidnappers, build a case, try them, convict them, sentence them. And the realistic expectation of everyone involved, including the court, is that none of the three men will ever spend a day in an Italian cell, because they are in Egypt, and Egypt is not sending them anywhere. The conviction is, at the same time, completely real and almost entirely symbolic.
That is not a criticism of the court. It is a description of how accountability works when the accused are officials of another sovereign state, and the accused state does not cooperate. There are two tracks. The legal track runs through Rome: indictments, evidence, hearings, verdicts, sentences. The practical track runs through diplomacy, and on that track the currency is not evidence but leverage — trade, arms sales, cooperation in the Mediterranean, the things two governments actually trade with each other. The Regeni family, who pushed this case through a decade of obstruction, have been living at the intersection of those two tracks the entire time: every concrete step forward in the courtroom coexisting with an Italian government that still has a functioning, sometimes warm, relationship with the government whose security officers it was putting on trial.
The shape of the verdict tells you something too. Kidnapping, not murder. Ten years, not a life sentence. One acquittal out of four defendants. Whatever the court believed about who ordered the abduction and who carried out the torture that killed Regeni, it convicted the three men of what the evidence in front of it could carry — the taking — and declined to go further. That is a narrower result than the prosecution and the family would have wanted, and it is also the kind of result you get when a case is tried in absentia, against officers of a foreign intelligence service, about events a decade old, in a country Egypt controls completely and Italy does not control at all.
In a financial column you would call this an unenforceable judgement: a claim that is valid, final, and worthless to the claimant because the counterparty is beyond the court’s reach. Here the claim is somewhat heavier than a debt. A 28-year-old researcher went to Cairo to study trade unions, was taken by the state’s own security apparatus, and came back in a coffin. Ten years later, the Italian state has formally, on the record, named three members of that apparatus as his kidnappers. Egypt will not hand them over. Italy knows it, the court knows it, the defendants presumably know it.
The verdict changes the paperwork, not the cell doors. But courts keep records even when they cannot open prisons, and sometimes the record is the point.