Dr Elisabetta Brighi, Lecturer in International Relations, has written an article for Open Democracy about France and Italy’s increase in arms sales to Egypt despite the murder of Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni by Egyptian security forces in 2016.
The article, which is an edited version of the Giulio Regeni Memorial Lecture delivered by Dr Brighi on 25 January 2022 at the University of Cambridge, outlines how arms sales to Egypt have increased dramatically in recent years from France and Italy despite the murder of Giulio Regeni and a crackdown on human rights and democratic freedoms more broadly by the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Speaking about France’s relationship with Egypt, Dr Brighi writes: “Between 2013 and 2017, France surpassed the United States to become the second top provider of arms to Egypt after Russia...A third of all Egyptian arms imports currently comes from France, while a quarter of all French military exports go to Egypt.”
On Italian arms sales to Egypt, she adds: “In 2019, Egypt also officially became the top client of Italian weapon exports. It remained Italy’s number one client in 2020 as well, with a volume of authorised transfers that has increased exponentially between 2016 and 2020: from 7m euros in 2016 to 60m in 2017, 800m in 2019, and almost 1bn euros in 2020.”
Explaining this increase, Dr Brighi writes: “Between 2016 and 2020, therefore, just as repression by the al-Sisi regime was escalating following Giulio Regeni’s murder, military cooperation between Egypt and its European partners intensified dramatically. The fight against Islamic terrorism – a much-loved mantra on both sides of the Mediterranean – served as the ideal pretext for a process of rearmament that benefited, in particular, private defence contractors and government elites in Egypt and Europe.”
Read the full article on the Open Democracy website.
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