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Ilaria Salis: Italian activist goes on trial in Hungary assault case

An Italian teacher accused of attacking alleged neo-Nazis in Hungary was to go on trial in a Budapest court on Friday, in a case that has sparked tensions between Rome and Budapest.

Published: 24 May 2024 09:00 CEST
Ilaria Salis: Italian activist goes on trial in Hungary assault case
Ilaria Salis arrives in court in Budapest on March 28th, 2024 ahead her trial. Salis was arrested in February 2023 and charged with attempted assault and accused of being part of an extreme left-wing organisation. (Photo by Attila KISBENEDEK / AFP)

The case of Ilaria Salis, 39, has been front-page news in Italy after she appeared in court in January handcuffed and chained, with her feet shackled.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni enjoys cordial relations with Hungary’s Viktor Orban but the case has caused bilateral tensions, with Rome making official complaints on behalf of Salis.

The teacher from Monza, near Milan, was arrested in Budapest in February last year.

Prosecutors allege Salis travelled to Budapest specifically to carry out the attacks against “unsuspecting victims identified as or perceived as far-right sympathisers” to deter “representatives of the far-right movement”.

She was charged with three counts of attempted assault and accused of being part of an extreme left-wing criminal organisation in the wake of a counter-demonstration against an annual neo-Nazi rally.

Salis denies the charges – which could see her jailed for up to 11 years – and claims that she is being persecuted for her political beliefs.

A defiant Salis told Italian newspaper La Stampa via her father in an interview published last week that she was “on the right side of history”.

On Friday, one of the victims and witnesses of one of the attacks are scheduled to testify, according to one of Salis’s Hungarian legal representatives.

Lawyer Gyorgy Magyar complained to AFP ahead of the trial that Salis has not yet received all the case documents in “her native language”.

“The translators promised to finish translating the documents in November, but until that (is done) she will not give any substantial testimony, and rightfully so,” he added.

Salis spent more than 15 months behind bars, but on Thursday was moved to house arrest on a 16 million forints (around 41,000 euros) bail, according to her father Roberto Salis.

Protesters in Milan hold a banner reading “Bring Ilaria Salis home” during a demonstration demanding Salis’s release from prison and against detention conditions in Hungary. (Photo by Piero CRUCIATTI / AFP)

She might be freed before any verdict is rendered on her case, if she is elected as a Member of the European Parliament.

Last month, the Italian Green and Left Alliance (AVS) nominated her as their lead candidate for the upcoming European elections.

If the party garners enough votes at the ballot, Salis might be eligible to access parliamentary immunity, leading to the suspension of the criminal proceedings against her.

Politicised case

The case of Ilaria Salis has been highly politicised, with the Hungarian government frequently commenting on it.

Salis’s father has accused the Hungarian authorities of double standards, claiming that they treated neo-Nazis, who allegedly assaulted anti-fascist activists around the same time, much more leniently.

“In this country, those people are considered patriots while anti-fascists are enemies of the state,” Roberto Salis told AFP.

He claims that his daughter was kept in inhumane prison conditions until January when her case received significant media coverage.

“For eight days, she was kept in a prison in a solitary cell, without being provided with toilet paper, sanitary towels, and soap.

“During that period, she would have needed the sanitary towels… in Italy, we would consider this torture,” Roberto Salis said.

The Council of Europe has criticised Hungary’s overcrowded prisons.

According to Eurostat, Hungary in 2022 recorded the highest prisoner rate per 100,000 people in the EU, followed by Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Hungarian officials have denied accusations of ill-treatment.

Prime Minister Orban’s nationalist government has repeatedly denounced the media for allegedly depicting Salis as a “martyr”, instead pointing to what it called the “brutality” of her alleged crimes.

“What we see here, in a quite outrageous case, is someone committing a brutal and public crime, and the European far-left is standing up for her and even trying to make her an MEP,” Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said on Thursday.

“It is incompatible with everything we see as European values, human decency and the necessity of punishing crimes,” he added.

Salis’s father has complained that the Italian government has provided only “limited” help to his daughter.

Italy’s Ambassador to Hungary is expected to attend the trial on Friday, the embassy told AFP.

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CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Published: 5 June 2024 12:33 CEST
Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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