Giulio Regeni. Amnesty International.Probably seven or eight Italians out of every ten now know that there are human rights violations in Egypt. That Egypt isn’t only a place you visit to see the Pyramids or to go scuba-diving in the Red Sea.
Why is that? It’s because people across Italy have been alerted to the terrible case of the 28-year-old Italian PhD student at Cambridge who was abducted, horribly tortured and killed in Cairo just over a year ago. His name, of course, was Giulio Regeni and we at Amnesty Italy have been running a Truth for Giulio (“Verita per Giulio”) campaign ever since.
The basic symbol for the Verita per Giulio campaign is very simple. We’ve asked people across Italy to hang out a yellow campaign banner with the words “Verita per Giulio” wherever possible. From their windows, their balconies, the facades of public buildings. This simple gesture has taken off throughout the country. Photographs of Giulio’s family with the banner on their small house in the north-east of Italy have been published widely. The image has become almost ubiquitous in Italy.
