Maurizio Giuliano

Maurizio Giuliano (born 1975) is an Italian-British United Nations official, traveller, author and journalist.

In 1993 he worked for the Austrian weekly magazine Profil, for which he interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev, who expressed criticism at the reforms carried out by Russian president Boris Yeltsin: when Yeltsin called a referendum for 25 April 1993 in an attempt to achieve even greater powers as president, Gorbachev told Giuliano that he would not vote and instead advocated for new presidential elections.

After completing high school in Milan and in Manchester, he earned a degree from the University of Oxford in 1996 and a master's degree from the University of Cambridge in 1997.

At University College, Oxford, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, specialising in Latin America and eastern Europe.

While at Oxford, he was a member of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society.

His scholarly work on internal Cuban politics, notably on the 1996 purge of Havana's Centre for American Studies (CEA) (contained in the book "El Caso CEA" published in 1998), has been the object of academic reviews, as it exposed the internal conflicts between Cuba's political apparatus and the country's intelligentsia, previously unknown.

According to some reviews the book, a work of investigative journalism complemented by academic analysis, dealt a strong blow to hard-liners within the regime by exposing for the first time the internal conflicts between Cuba's apparatus and its intelligentsia.

As of 1998, he was a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CESOC) in Santiago, Chile.

He authored two books and some academic articles on Cuban politics, focusing among other things on the US embargo, which he claimed (in the book "La Transición Cubana y el "Bloqueo" Norteamericano" and other works) has a strong counter-productive effect, in supporting the continuation of Cuba's regime.

In the book and other writings, Giuliano staunchly contested the view that an end to the Castro regime would be near, and expressed the view that any transition would be slow and gradual.

In an article published in the British academic journal Democratization in 1998, he focused in particular on how the US embargo against Cuba helps create "empathy" by third parties towards Cuba, which is then domestically perceived as support towards Cuba's regime.

He argued, hence, that the US Government - in addition to the embargo's direct influence on supporting Cuba's regime - indirectly inhibits potentially constructive pressures towards change, insofar as third countries, foreign non-governmental organizations and prominent individuals lend support to Cuba's resistance to the US embargo, and this offsets external pressures to democratize, thereby allowing the Cuban regime to convert such "empathy" into a source of legitimacy at home.

On 16 August 1998 he was denied entry to Myanmar after making contact with the National League for Democracy and meeting its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, with Myanmar authorities accusing him of falsely claiming to be a tourist and of "illegally gathering news", which prompted condemnations by organizations such as the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters without Borders; only in 2013 Giuliano managed to return to Myanmar and also meet Suu Kyi.

In 2000, he visited North Korea and published an essay about his visit, essentially describing his tour around the country as a mise en scène by the North Korean authorities.

In his journalistic work, he reportedly ran into problems with the authorities of at least two countries.

In the early 2000s, Giuliano was a consultant for the Italian Senate's Committee on Human Rights.

At that time, some his writings were intended to influence the positions of the Italian Government on certain human rights issues, as was the case with material that he wrote on North Korea.

In 2001 Cuban exiled scholars Alberto Álvarez and Gerardo González, who were among those purged from the CEA, wrote the book "¿ Intelectuales vs. Revolución ? El caso del Centro de Estudios sobre América", which strongly built upon Giuliano's book to offer further insights on relations between Cuba's political apparatus and the country's intellectuals.

Along with these two scholars and Giuliano, Cuban sociologist Haroldo Dilla Alfonso

While on 30 October 2002, he was reportedly detained and manhandled by Israeli authorities while crossing the Allenby Bridge, which also prompted condemnation by Reporters without Borders.

Giuliano however describes his worst authorities-related odyssey as he was travelling in 2003 around the South Pacific, where authorities in New Zealand and some South Pacific islands reportedly caused serious hindrance to his movements for the simple fact that he appeared to be suspicious because of his strange travel patterns.

Giuliano's writings have also included lighter topics.

During his time in Kabul, for example, he wrote restaurant reviews for a local English-language magazine.

As of 2004 he was, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the youngest person to have visited all sovereign nations of the world (aged 28 years and 361 days).

He has worked for various international organizations in the field of media relations.

Giuliano is the son of a lawyer father and a housewife mother.

He has lived in Cuba, Chile and Indonesia.

In 2004, Giuliano worked for the International Organization for Migration in the elections for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where he advocated for turnout by potential voters in spite of precarious security conditions.

And in 2005 he worked in Afghanistan for the United Nations Development Programme's justice division which endeavoured to reform the country's legal system.

In both cases, he was working in the field of communications with the media.

He worked for the United Nations, again in the field of media relations, in Central African Republic in 2006, where he denounced very low levels of funding for a "neglected" emergency and called Western governments to be generous in saving lives of the most vulnerable Central Africans.

He moved to Sudan in 2007, where he vocally denounced abuses by increasingly fragmented armed groups as well as access constraints caused by the Sudanese Government, and called for more funding also in response to floods that hit the city of Kassala.

In 2008 he was posted to Chad, calling for more international attention amidst conflict between Chadian and pro-Sudanese forces which displaced more than half a million people, and with the events culminating in the battle of N'Djamena of February 2008, after which he worked in Cameroon following the refugee crisis caused by war and asking for solid international support for the refugees and for reconstruction efforts, warning that a humanitarian crisis could turn into a humanitarian catastrophe in the absence of a robust response.

In 2009 and 2010 he worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he denounced attacks by warring parties against civilians and the use of rape as a weapon of war, referring to rape as a "pandemic" and "plague".

He denounced the brutality of expulsions between the DRC and Angola, alleging that both countries were committing rapes of illegal immigrants who were being deported, and urging them to investigate the allegations on both sides of the border.

In response to Giuliano's criticism about the extent of rape in the country, Congo's Government spokesperson Lambert Mende dubbed him as "the rape spokesperson".

In 2010 he was UN spokesperson for the 2010 Pakistan floods.

He warned of an impending "second wave of death" that would result from post-flood disease and food shortages, stating that 3.5 million children were at risk of death if they did not get assistance, including due to cholera.

expressed the view that the purge mechanisms described in Giuliano's book have been a key pillar for the regime's ability to prevent the rise of reformers, and that such dynamics remain in place as late as 2016.

Besides work on Cuba, other countries Giuliano covered in his journalistic work include East Timor and Myanmar (Burma).