Liliana Segre returns to Senate for Zaki citizenship vote

Liliana Segre

  ROME - Liliana Segre, the Italian Senator for Life, has announced that she will be appearing in the Senate on Wednesday to vote for Italian citizenship for Patrick Zaki.

  Zaki is an Egyptian student, studying at the University of Bologna, who was seized by Egyptian authorities on Feb 7, 2020, when he went home for a short holiday. He has been detained unlawfully ever since, accused of “disseminating false news” and “inciting to protest,” allegedly being interrogated and tortured.

  There has been much international pressure, particularly from Italy, to free him, and the Senate are now voting on the motion to give him citizenship, in order to provide him necessary legal assistance

  Liliana Segre is a Holocaust survivor and was in 2018 made a Senator for Life by President Sergio Mattarella for “outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.”

  Segre has only come to Palazzo Madama once since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic (for the vote of confidence for Giuseppe Conte’s government in January), but is now willing to come to show her strong support for the motion, already backed by the Democratic Party, 5 Star Movement, the League, Italia Viva, +Europa and the Mixed Group.

  She said in a statement, “I signed with deep conviction the motion that requests the Italian government to immediately concede Italian citizenship to Patrick Zaki, the researcher at the University of Bologna detained without any reason and without trial… I will be present in the Senate to support the motion and the liberation of Zaki. Zaki’s detention without trial is a blatant violation of human and civil rights chat the democratic state of Italy cannot accept without doing everything possible to obtain the liberation of the prisoner, beginning with the immediate approval of citizenship.”

  The motion for Zaki’s citizenship is being presented following a campaign for signatures (receiving 160,000) by Station to Station and the Sardines movement, and is led by the Senators Filippo Sensi, Riccardo Magi and Lia Quartapelle.

 

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Patrick Zaki