Human rights lawyers led by Omer Shatz and Juan Branco have filed a request to investigate over 100 officials from European Union institutions and member states to the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing them of committing "crimes against humanity" affecting migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
Human rights lawyers have listed the names of over 100 European officials in a brief filed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing them of alleged complicity in crimes against humanity committed against migrants in transit along the Central Mediterranean route.
The over 700-page-long document presented by attorneys Omer Shatz and Juan Branco included a list of EU agencies and member states involved in drafting and implementing migration policies, concerning in particular the Central Mediterranean route and Libya, from 2014 until 2020.
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List includes former premiers, ex interior ministers and French President
The document also includes a database of over 500 European officials who were in office during the period examined and a list of 122 people accused of being "co-perpetrators" of alleged crimes against migrants.
The list includes, among others, former Italian premiers Matteo Renzi, Paolo Gentiloni and Giuseppe Conte, ex interior ministers Angelino Alfano, Marco Minniti and Matteo Salvini, as well as former German chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, former French and German interior ministers, Bernard Cazeneuve and Thomas de Maizière, and the former deputy president of the European Commission Frans Timmermans.
The case follows a six-year-long investigation supported by the International Law in Action, (a course for Master's students in Human Rights, a part of the Humanitarian Action program at the prestigious academic institution Sciences Po in Paris.
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Over 25,000 died over the 2015-2025 period
It is based on interviews with 77 senior European officials, exclusive access to high-level European Council meetings and the analysis of numerous confidential documents.
Over the past decade (2015-2025), according to the document, more than 25,000 asylum seekers have died in the Central Mediterranean and over 150,000 survivors have been forcibly transferred to Libya, where they have been detained, tortured, raped and enslaved.
The two lawyers in 2019 already filed another case to the ICC claiming these crimes had been committed in compliance with EU policies aimed at "preventing the arrival of migrants in Europe at all cost."
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