Recent weeks have seen crucial developments in the case of Cambridge doctoral researcher Giulio Regeni, who was abducted and murdered in Cairo in January 2016. On December 10 the Italian parliament’s committee on the inquiry into his death held hearings with prosecutors Sergio Giarritta and Michele Prestipino Colaiocco from the Tribunal of Rome. The prosecutors have found that there is sufficient evidence to charge four agents of the Egyptian security forces with kidnapping, grievous bodily harm, and homicide.

The Tribunal of Rome’s mandate has coaxed the Italian government to consider a harsher political stance toward the Egyptian authorities — though still only tentatively so. On December 17, foreign minister Luigi di Maio urged the government to demand European support for Italian diplomatic pressure on Egypt to help the search for truth.

The Italian government’s newfound interest for human rights in Egypt may yet signal a forthcoming change in its relations with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime. This could even mean full government support for the judiciary’s call for a stronger diplomatic stance. But in the four long years since Regeni’s death, Italian governments have fallen well short of their proclaimed principles. This period has seen a profound institutional divide between the judiciary, which has relentlessly sought to reconstruct the events of those fatal days, and the various governments that have wavered in front of the cold dictates of realpolitik.