Landmark ICC trial on Libya migrant abuses must lead to more scrutiny of EU complicity

Share & more In late July, judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) unanimously voted to confirm charges against former Libyan security official Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, paving the way for his case to move to trial. El Hishri stands accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes including imprisonment, torture, rape, murder, enslavement, and persecution against Libyan and non-Libyan detainees – among them migrants and refugees – at the notorious Mitiga prison in Libya’s capital, Tripoli. The case – the first to reach trial since the ICC opened an investigation into international crimes committed in Libya 15 years ago – marks a major legal breakthrough, offering a long-awaited, if still partial, reckoning for survivors and Libyans more broadly with the system that enabled the abuses. “Migrants who passed through Libya have been waiting for this justice. Anyone who violates people’s rights should face the consequences.” “I never thought these crimes would reach the ICC,” said C., a Gambian survivor of Mitiga, after the charges were confirmed. “Migrants who passed through Libya have been waiting for this justice. Anyone who violates people’s rights should face the consequences.” The trial, which is likely to begin in the coming months and may last several years, matters beyond the case’s immediate focus on El Hishri and Mitiga. Migrant and refugee detainees experienced particular forms of racialised abuse and exploitation, including enslavement, linking Mitiga to a wider detention industry in Libya that is deeply entwined with European migration control policies. While the El Hishri trial will focus on the individual criminal responsibility of one Libyan prison official, testimonies from migrant and refugee victims can help place before the court the wider system of migration containment, exploitation, and abuse across Libya and the central Mediterranean in which Mitiga is embedded. That wider context must prompt the ICC prosecutor to investigate the role and potential criminal responsibility of individual EU and member state officials as well. El Hishri and Mitiga It is difficult to discuss the ICC right now without acknowledging the immense scrutiny and pressure surrounding the court and the fact that former Prosecutor Karim Khan was removed in late July following allegations of serious personal misconduct. In particular, the court is facing sanctions against its staff and a campaign by the United States to dismantle it “brick by brick” following its decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Against this backdrop, the El Hishri case affirms the ICC’s importance as the only permanent, independent international court able to pursue justice for the gravest international crimes where national authorities fail to do so. At Mitiga, El Hishri was known as “the angel of death”. El Hishri was a senior official in the Special Deterrence Force militia (known as the SDF or RADA) that controlled the area where Mitiga prison is located. He is alleged to have exercised general authority over the facility and direct control over its women’s section. At Mitiga, El Hishri was known as “the angel of death”. Both Libyan and non-Libyan detainees faced severe overcrowding and inhuman conditions, prolonged detention without meaningful legal process, arbitrary violence, and no clear prospect of release. Detainees were beaten, tortured, raped, and subjected to other forms of sexual violence. Some were enslaved and forced to work, while others were deliberately humiliated, terrorised, and murdered. The 17 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes confirmed against El Hishri by the court reflect this catalogue of horrors. Black migrants were subjected to particularly brutal and racialised forms of exploitation and abuse. The EU, through its support for migration control in Libya, contributed to people ending up in the facility. T., now a refugee in Italy, fled his home in South Sudan due to armed conflict. After months of abuse by traffickers in Libya and with no legal pathway to seek asylum there, he made several attempts in 2019 and 2020 to cross the central Mediterranean, one of the world’s deadliest migration routes. Instead of reaching safety, however, the EU-supported Libyan Coast Guard intercepted his boat and pulled those on board back to detention in Libya. After a short time in al-Jadida prison in early 2020, T. was transferred to Mitiga, where he endured nearly five months in captivity before managing to escape. B. and C., two young Gambian women, reached Mitiga by a different route. In early 2017, they were arrested during a violent raid on Gargaresh, a Tripoli neighbourhood where many migrants live. Operations like this, carried out under the pretext of crime control, often target Black migrants on racialised grounds. After three months in Mitiga, the women were transferred to a detention centre under Libya’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration and told they must accept repatriation through the EU-supported Assisted Voluntary Return programme of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) or die in detention. Europe’s role As our work supporting survivors of crimes at Mitiga – including T., B., C., and others – to participate as victims in the El Hishri case has shown, migrant and refugee experiences there cannot be understood only through what happened inside Mitiga itself. For people on the move, Mitiga was one point within a wider migrant containment regime spanning multiple sites of captivity and detention across Libyan territory and the Mediterranean Sea. That regime developed within Libya’s post-2011 conflict economy as armed groups, traffickers, detention authorities, and state-affiliated actors, such as the Libyan Coast Guard, turned the capture and confinement of migrants into a profitable business model. Migrants and refugees became commodities within that model, exploited for labour, extorted for money, traded between actors, and used to generate political power and legitimacy. European migration policy has been, and remains, inextricably linked to this model’s expansion and profitability. Especially since 2016, the EU and its member states, with Italy at the forefront, have supported Libyan actors to prevent departures across the Mediterranean. Through funding, equipment, coordination, and political backing, European governments and entities like the EU’s border agency Frontex have helped consolidate a system in which interception at sea and detention on land serve both European and Libyan interests. Existing trafficking and detention economies in Libya fused with externally backed migration-control functions, allowing militias and other actors to continue profiting from illicit practices while also gaining legitimacy, resources, and political leverage through state-affiliated roles in migrant interception and containment. So-called voluntary return programmes by the IOM also operate within this context, offering detention actors additional income and legitimacy while people are denied meaningful access to individual assessment or asylum procedures. European actors have pursued these migration policies in full knowledge that arbitrary detention, exploitation, and abuse are built into the system on which they rely. Survivors, UN officials, human rights organisations, and journalists have documented these abuses for years, increasingly recognising them as crimes against humanity and war crimes. The El Hishri case at the ICC should only mark the beginning of a more serious reckoning with Europe’s responsibility for international crimes against people on the move in Libya and the Mediterranean, and with the wider impunity that has so far sustained this system.