JUSTICE & ACCOUNTABILITY
International Criminal Court
Refugees in Libya engages with the International Criminal Court as a survivor-led civil society organisation rooted in affected communities, but also as investigators, documenters, community builders, outreach actors and campaigners for justice, accountability and equality. As a member of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, we engage with international justice not only as survivors and witnesses of crimes, but as active participants in the struggle to investigate them, preserve evidence, strengthen survivor participation, challenge impunity and shape the pursuit of accountability.
Our relationship with international justice system(s) predates the founding of Refugees in Libya. Since at least 2018, individuals who would later become members of our collective were already engaging with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and other accountability actors concerning crimes committed in Libya. What began through individual testimony, documentation and efforts to seek accountability has since developed into an organised and continuing engagement between affected communities and international justice mechanisms.
Today, our work with the Court includes supporting survivors who wish to understand and participate in proceedings, documenting crimes and preserving information from affected communities, contributing to accountability processes, working alongside legal partners, following developments in the Libya Situation and advocating for investigations capable of reaching those most responsible. This work is not confined to events of the past. It continues while detention, torture, trafficking, sexual violence, interception and return, disappearances and other abuses remain part of the reality faced by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Libya.
We have welcomed important advances in the ICC’s Libya investigation and have seen what becomes possible when evidence is followed, states cooperate and survivors are able to enter judicial proceedings. At the same time we continue to challenge the persistent accountability gap surrounding crimes committed specifically against refugees and migrants, failures by states to fulfil their obligations to the Court, and any approach to international criminal justice in which political power, nationality or institutional position determines how far an investigation is prepared to go.
For us, the credibility of international justice depends not simply on whether prosecutions take place, but on whether the law is applied equally and whether evidence is followed wherever it leads. A system that reaches some perpetrators while leaving others beyond meaningful scrutiny cannot fulfil the promise on which international criminal justice rests.
Justice cannot be selective.
Why the International Criminal Court?
The crimes committed in Libya are not simply a collection of individual abuses. Torture, arbitrary detention, enslavement, sexual violence, murder, persecution and other forms of violence have been repeatedly documented across state-controlled and unofficial detention centres, military compounds, trafficking sites and EU-backed interception-and-return operations at sea. Many of these crimes have taken place within structures connected to state institutions, armed groups and powerful political and security networks. The question has therefore never been only whether a particular guard, trafficker or commander can be prosecuted, but whether those who organise, command, enable and sustain these systems can also be brought before justice.
The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over the Situation in Libya following its referral by the United Nations Security Council in 2011. This makes the Court one of the few judicial institutions capable of examining alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes at a level that reaches beyond individual incidents and towards patterns of violence, structures of command and those bearing the greatest responsibility. That role matters particularly where domestic accountability has repeatedly failed. Libya's political fragmentation, the entanglement of armed groups with state institutions, weaknesses in judicial independence and the protection enjoyed by powerful alleged perpetrators have created profound obstacles to justice. The ICC cannot remedy every failure of the Libyan justice system, nor can one institution account for every crime committed in the country, but it remains one of the few mechanisms capable of confronting criminal responsibility at the level these crimes demand.
Our engagement with the Court is therefore neither based on blind confidence nor on the belief that international institutions should be beyond criticism. We engage because the Court possesses a mandate capable of addressing crimes that national systems have often been unwilling or unable to prosecute, and because that mandate carries obligations of its own. The Court matters because impunity in Libya has become structural. Our engagement seeks to ensure that accountability becomes structural too.
From Individual Engagement to Collective Action
Refugees in Libya was founded in 2021, but our engagement with international justice began years before the organisation had a name. Since at least 2018, individuals who would later become founding members of Refugees in Libya were already engaging with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and other accountability actors concerning crimes committed in Libya. That engagement emerged from lived experience and from the necessity of ensuring that what was happening inside detention centres, trafficking sites and other places of abuse would not disappear without a record.
When Refugees in Libya emerged in 2021, those individual efforts acquired a collective structure. Information that had previously depended on isolated relationships could be preserved and compared; survivors could reach one another more easily; documentation could become more systematic; and engagement with investigators and accountability institutions could develop as part of an organised pursuit of justice rather than through individual encounters alone. What changed was not the existence of the demand for accountability, but our capacity to pursue it collectively.
That distinction remains important to how we understand ourselves today. Refugees in Libya did not create the demand for justice. The demand was already there, carried by people who had survived crimes, witnessed them, documented them and refused to accept that impunity was the natural condition of life in Libya. What the organisation created was a collective means through which that demand could be sustained, strengthened and carried into spaces of international accountability.
ECCHR × Refugees in Libya: Partners for Justice and Accountability
Our engagement with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) began in late 2022 and developed from a shared concern over the enormous distance between what was already known about crimes committed against refugees and migrants in Libya and the accountability that had followed. ECCHR had already developed substantial legal work on international crimes in Libya and on the role of European actors in the system of interception, return and detention. Refugees in Libya brought to that work the perspective and knowledge of affected communities, survivor-led documentation, continuing relationships with people inside and outside Libya and an understanding of the structures of violence that comes from proximity to the communities living through them.
The relationship deepened in 2023, when Refugees in Libya co-founder David Yambio joined ECCHR's International Crimes and Accountability programme as a project fellow. That period strengthened cooperation around international criminal law, survivor participation and possible pathways through which crimes committed against refugees and migrants could be pursued before accountability mechanisms. The partnership developed further through survivor outreach, evidence and documentation work, strategic litigation and sustained engagement with the ICC's investigation into Libya.
Our cooperation has never been based on transforming survivors into cases. It rests on the opposite principle: legal strategies must remain connected to the people whose experiences give those strategies their purpose. That has meant working together to support people who choose to participate in accountability processes, connecting community knowledge with legal expertise and ensuring that international-crimes litigation does not become detached from those still living with the consequences of the crimes being investigated.
By 2025, that cooperation had developed into a more public and institutional partnership. In June of that year, ECCHR and Refugees in Libya jointly published our position paper on the Situation in Libya at the International Criminal Court, setting out concerns about the proposed completion of the Libya investigation, the continuing absence of meaningful accountability for crimes committed against refugees and migrants, weaknesses in complementarity and the need to examine the responsibility of actors beyond Libya where the evidence warrants it. Our cooperation has also taken concrete form through the consequences of the Almasri case and through our joint support for survivors participating in the proceedings against Khaled El Hishri.
Our Position on the ICC’s Libya Investigation
Our engagement with the International Criminal Court is grounded in support for international justice, but not in the assumption that the Court’s work in Libya should be beyond criticism simply because it takes place under the authority of the Rome Statute. We have seen the importance of the Court’s intervention, the value of arrest warrants, the significance of survivor participation and the consequences that can follow when states cooperate. At the same time, we have also seen how easily progress in one part of an investigation can coexist with prolonged inaction in another. Our position has therefore developed around a simple expectation: the credibility of the Libya investigation must be judged not only by the cases it has opened, but also by the areas of criminality it has recognised and still failed to bring meaningfully before the Court.
This concern became particularly urgent in 2025, when the Office of the Prosecutor was moving towards the proposed completion of its investigative activities in the Libya Situation. In our June 2025 joint position paper with ECCHR, we opposed any approach that would treat the investigation as nearing an institutional endpoint while grave crimes remained ongoing, cooperation from Libyan authorities remained uncertain and major accountability gaps were still unresolved. Libya’s acceptance in May 2025 of ICC jurisdiction over alleged Rome Statute crimes committed through the end of 2027 reinforced that concern. Expanding the temporal reach of the Court’s jurisdiction while simultaneously moving towards the completion of investigations appeared to us fundamentally contradictory. If jurisdiction remains open because serious crimes may continue to be committed, the investigative capacity to respond to those crimes must remain open as well.
Our concern was not that the Court had achieved nothing. Important progress had already been made in other parts of the Libya Situation, and further developments would follow. The problem was that progress remained profoundly uneven. Crimes committed against refugees and migrants had for years been recognised within the ICC’s investigative priorities, yet this remained the area in which the gap between recognition and visible accountability was most difficult to justify. By the time of our June 2025 position paper, no public arrest warrant had been issued specifically through that investigative stream, despite years of testimony, documentation and findings by international bodies describing patterns of arbitrary detention, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, enslavement, killings, forced labour, extortion and other serious abuses against refugees and migrants.
For us, that absence could no longer be explained simply by saying that investigations take time or that evidence is difficult to obtain. The communities affected by these crimes have been providing information for years. Survivors have identified detention sites, described chains of abuse, named perpetrators where possible, explained how people are moved between formal detention facilities and trafficking structures, documented interceptions at sea and described what happens after people are returned to Libya. United Nations mechanisms, journalists, human rights organisations and international investigators have independently documented many of the same patterns. The central question has therefore increasingly become not whether information exists, but whether the investigative priorities publicly recognised by international institutions are ultimately translated into cases.
This is also why we have resisted the tendency to treat violence against refugees and migrants primarily through the language of migration control, smuggling or trafficking. Those categories may be legally relevant in particular circumstances, but they cannot substitute for an examination of whether the conduct forms part of wider or systematic criminal structures capable of amounting to crimes against humanity or war crimes. Where people are imprisoned, tortured, raped, enslaved, killed or repeatedly transferred through systems built around captivity and exploitation, the legal analysis must be capable of addressing the gravity and organisation of the violence itself. Migration status cannot become a category that lowers the level at which international criminal law is prepared to understand a crime.
Our position has also been shaped by the limits of complementarity. The Rome Statute places primary responsibility for prosecution on national jurisdictions, but that principle can only function where domestic authorities are genuinely willing and able to act. In Libya, alleged perpetrators have often remained embedded within or protected by powerful security, military and political structures. In European jurisdictions, conduct connected to abuses against refugees and migrants has frequently been addressed through narrower legal categories that do not necessarily confront the wider international-crimes dimension. Complementarity cannot become a justification for institutional waiting where national proceedings do not meaningfully reach those most responsible. Its purpose is to make justice possible through the appropriate forum, not to create another layer through which accountability can be indefinitely deferred.
We therefore measure the Libya investigation by more than the existence of an investigative mandate or the publication of institutional updates. We look at whether evidence produces warrants, whether warrants are executed, whether suspects are actually brought before the Court, whether survivors can participate meaningfully and whether the investigative priorities announced by the Office of the Prosecutor eventually result in prosecutions. We also look at whether the Court is prepared to follow responsibility beyond the most immediately visible perpetrators and whether political difficulty changes the intensity with which different lines of inquiry are pursued.
Our position is consequently neither one of rejection nor unconditional endorsement. We support the International Criminal Court because its work can produce consequences that would otherwise be extremely difficult to achieve, and because the Libya Situation requires an institution capable of investigating crimes at a level beyond isolated incidents. But support cannot mean silence when major parts of the same situation remain without meaningful accountability. The advances that have been made should not be used to obscure what remains unresolved; they should demonstrate that progress is possible and increase the expectation that the same determination will be applied elsewhere.
The Libya investigation should therefore not be judged by whether it can eventually declare itself complete. It should be judged by whether it has confronted the structures of criminality within its jurisdiction with sufficient consistency, independence and seriousness. As long as major systems of violence remain inadequately investigated, as long as those most responsible remain beyond meaningful scrutiny and as long as entire affected populations continue to wait for the accountability they were told international justice could provide, the work cannot credibly be treated as finished.
The Court baseline
26 Feb 2011
UN Security Council Resolution 1970 refers the situation in Libya to the ICC.
3 Mar 2011
The Office of the Prosecutor opens the Libya investigation.
12 May 2025
Libya lodges an Article 12(3) declaration accepting ICC jurisdiction over alleged crimes on Libyan territory from 2011 through the end of 2027.
Almasri: When International Justice Met State Power
The contradictions we had already identified in the Libya investigation became concrete in January 2025, when Osama Elmasry Njeem, commonly known as Almasri, entered Europe while subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. For years, survivors had described Mitiga as a place of detention, torture, killings, rape and other forms of sexual violence, forced labour and systematic humiliation. For some members of Refugees in Libya, Mitiga is not a site known through reports or court filings, but a place they survived. When a person sought by the ICC in connection with crimes committed within that detention system was located on the territory of a State Party, the question was no longer whether European governments knew about the allegations coming from Libya. The question was whether the machinery of international justice would still function when cooperation required a European state to act.
On 18 January 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber I issued a warrant for Almasri for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against people detained in prison facilities in Tripoli. The warrant concerned allegations including murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, imprisonment and cruel treatment. After receiving information that he was travelling within the Schengen area, the Court transmitted requests for his arrest and surrender to several States Parties. Italian authorities arrested him in Turin on 19 January. At that moment, the sequence international criminal justice depends upon appeared to be functioning: the Court had issued a warrant, a State Party had located the suspect and he was in national custody awaiting the procedures that could lead to surrender to The Hague.
Two days later, that sequence broke down. On 21 January, the Rome Court of Appeal ordered Almasri’s release after finding irregularities in the domestic procedure through which he had been detained. The judicial order concerned the legality of his custody under Italian law; it did not require that he be returned to Libya. What followed was a separate decision by the Italian executive. The Interior Ministry ordered his expulsion, and the Italian state transported him to Tripoli aboard a government aircraft. The ICC subsequently stated that the release and return had taken place without prior notice or consultation with the Court, despite ongoing communication between the Registry and Italian authorities and the availability of consultation procedures under the Rome Statute.
That distinction became central to everything that followed. The Almasri affair could not be reduced to the claim that an Italian court had discovered a technical defect and therefore the matter was over. The procedural problem explained why his detention under that particular domestic process collapsed. It did not, by itself, explain the political decision to return him directly to Libya, nor why Italy did so before resolving its obligations towards the Court. The Italian Government later relied on several explanations, including defects it identified in the warrant and the domestic procedure, concerns for public order and national security, and the existence of an alleged Libyan extradition request. The ICC proceedings that followed examined those explanations against Italy’s obligations as a State Party to the Rome Statute.
For Refugees in Libya, the significance of what happened was immediate. Survivors had spent years providing testimony, preserving memories and identifying structures and individuals associated with crimes in detention. International institutions had repeatedly encouraged affected people to cooperate with investigations and to believe that evidence could eventually lead to accountability. Yet when the Court’s warrant reached the point at which cooperation by a European state was required, the suspect was returned to the same country in which the alleged crimes had taken place. The gap between the promise of international justice and its dependence on state power became impossible to treat as an abstract institutional problem.
We responded publicly and politically from the first days of the case. Refugees in Libya condemned the release and return, joined civil society demands for accountability and brought survivors’ perspectives into a debate that was rapidly becoming dominated by disputes between institutions and ministers. On 29 January 2025, the case was brought into the Italian Parliament through a press conference at Montecitorio. Our concern was not only that a warrant had failed. It was that survivors whose experiences had helped make accountability possible were being asked to watch a state capable of surrendering a suspect instead facilitate his return.
The legal consequences did not end with his departure from Italy. On 17 February 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber I formally invited Italy to explain its failure to surrender Almasri. The Office of the Prosecutor subsequently requested a finding of non-compliance under Article 87(7) of the Rome Statute. Italy defended its conduct before the Court, and the Chamber considered the competing accounts of what had happened, the channels through which the cooperation request had been transmitted, the domestic procedural difficulties raised by the Government and whether Italy had used the consultation mechanisms available under the Statute.
On 17 October 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber I found that Italy had failed to comply with the Court’s request for cooperation and that this failure had prevented the Court from exercising its functions and powers in relation to Almasri. The significance of that decision went beyond the political accusations that had followed his return. Non-cooperation was no longer only a description used by survivors, civil society organisations or critics of the Italian Government; it had become a judicial finding of the International Criminal Court itself. The Chamber initially deferred the question of whether Italy’s conduct should be referred further under Article 87(7), but on 26 January 2026 it referred Italy’s non-compliance to the Assembly of States Parties, bringing the dispute into the political body responsible for oversight of cooperation among states belonging to the Rome Statute system.
Almasri himself remains outside ICC custody. In April 2026, his Defence also initiated proceedings challenging the Court’s jurisdiction and the admissibility of the case. Those proceedings do not alter the central fact that gave rise to the cooperation dispute: Italy had him in custody pursuant to an ICC warrant and he was returned to Libya before the Court could obtain his surrender. The case therefore continues on several levels at once, involving the outstanding warrant against Almasri, litigation concerning the Court’s jurisdiction and admissibility, and the consequences of Italy’s failure to cooperate.
The decision to return him also generated another accountability track beyond the ICC. In Y v. Italy, a survivor of detention and torture in Libya brought an application before the European Court of Human Rights concerning the consequences of Italy’s failure to surrender Almasri to the International Criminal Court. The case, supported by ECCHR in cooperation with Refugees in Libya, was communicated to Italy in May 2026 and given priority by the European Court. The questions before Strasbourg are different from those before the ICC, but the connection is direct: a decision that prevented one avenue of international accountability has itself become the subject of another judicial examination concerning the rights of a survivor affected by that failure.
For us, Almasri ultimately revealed the extent to which an international court remains dependent on decisions made by national governments. The ICC can investigate, issue warrants and request cooperation, but it has no police force capable of executing those warrants independently. The effectiveness of international criminal justice therefore depends on what states do when cooperation stops being symbolic and begins to carry political consequences. Italy demonstrated that a suspect could be located and arrested. The failure occurred afterwards, when the obligation to cooperate came into conflict with other considerations and state power prevailed over surrender.
The case remains important not because Almasri alone represents the entire system of violence in Libya, but because it exposed the fragility of accountability when states are able to determine whether an international warrant reaches a courtroom. It also created the clearest possible contrast with what happened several months later in the case of Khaled El Hishri. There, another European State Party received an ICC warrant, made an arrest and ultimately surrendered the suspect to The Hague. The difference between the two cases was not the existence of international law. It was what states chose to do with it.
Almasri: Court-record chronology
2 Oct 2024
OTP applies under seal for an arrest warrant against Osama Elmasry/Almasri Njeem.
17 Jan 2025
ICC learns that Njeem is within the Schengen area; the Chamber accelerates consideration of the warrant application.
18 Jan 2025
Pre-Trial Chamber I, by majority, issues the arrest warrant. The Registry sends cooperation requests to six States Parties, including Italy, and the Court seeks an INTERPOL Red Notice. A search-and-seizure request is also issued.
19 Jan 2025
Italian authorities locate and arrest him in Turin.
21 Jan 2025
Italy releases him and returns him to Libya. The ICC records that this occurred without prior notice or consultation with the Court.
24 Jan 2025
The warrant is publicly unsealed together with Judge María del Socorro Flores Liera’s dissenting opinion.
17 Feb 2025
Pre-Trial Chamber I formally invites Italy to explain its failure to surrender Almasri.
25 Feb 2025
The Prosecutor requests a formal finding of Italian non-compliance under Article 87(7).
25 Mar–6 May 2025
Italy seeks extensions while domestic proceedings continue; the Chamber refuses an indefinite postponement. Italy ultimately files its submissions on 6 May.
18 Feb 2025
Separately, the ICC sends Libya a request for Almasri’s arrest and surrender.
17 Oct 2025
Pre-Trial Chamber I formally finds Italy failed to comply with the Court’s cooperation request, while deferring whether to refer the matter to the Assembly of States Parties or UN Security Council pending additional information.
30 Apr 2026
The Registry transmits an admissibility challenge by Almasri under Articles 17(1)(a) and 19 of the Rome Statute.
22 Jul 2026
Pre-Trial Chamber I issues a decision concerning requests to file observations on that jurisdiction/admissibility challenge.
Current
Almasri remains at large
El Hishri: When Survivors Reached the Court
Six months after Almasri was returned to Libya, a very different sequence began in Germany. On 10 July 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber I issued under seal a warrant of arrest for Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri in connection with alleged crimes committed at Mitiga Prison and within the wider Mitiga compound in Tripoli. German authorities arrested him on 16 July, and on 1 December 2025 Germany surrendered him to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Where the Almasri case had demonstrated how quickly an ICC warrant could be frustrated when a state chose not to carry cooperation through to surrender, the El Hishri case demonstrated the opposite: when a State Party executes the Court’s request, an investigation can move from evidence and warrant to custody and judicial proceedings.
The allegations concern thousands of people detained at Mitiga between 1 May 2014 and 30 June 2020. The case encompasses torture and cruel treatment, imprisonment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape, attempted rape and other forms of sexual violence, murder and attempted murder, enslavement, persecution and other inhumane acts. The alleged victims include Libyans as well as refugees and migrants detained within a system in which violence, coercion and prolonged captivity were used against people held under the authority of the forces controlling the compound.
For many within Refugees in Libya and the communities around us, Mitiga is inseparable from the significance of the case. Former detainees had spoken about what happened there long before an arrest warrant existed and at a time when there was no certainty that anyone associated with the prison would ever appear before an international court. They described cells, guards, interrogations, torture, sexual violence, forced labour, humiliation, deaths and disappearances, as well as the structures through which detainees were controlled and moved. Some carried those accounts into conversations with investigators and accountability organisations years after leaving the prison; others remained in Libya or elsewhere in conditions that made speaking publicly extremely difficult. The proceedings against El Hishri did not discover those experiences. They created a judicial process in which years of testimony and investigation could finally be tested before a court.
His surrender therefore changed the nature of our work around the case. The question was no longer principally whether an arrest warrant would ever be executed, but how survivors could understand and enter proceedings that had suddenly become real. Together with ECCHR, Refugees in Libya worked to support people seeking to participate before the Court, including refugees and migrants who had experienced crimes within the Mitiga detention system. This involved connecting survivors with legal representation and information about the proceedings, helping people understand what participation could mean, and addressing the practical barriers created by displacement, language, documentation, distance and insecurity. For people whose relatives remain in Libya, participation may also carry fears about exposure or retaliation. For others, repeated encounters with institutions that had previously taken testimony without producing visible consequences had created understandable doubts about what another international process might deliver.
That work became particularly important as the case moved towards the confirmation-of-charges hearing. From 19 to 21 May 2026, Pre-Trial Chamber I heard the Prosecution, Defence and legal representatives of participating victims in proceedings to determine whether the evidence reached the threshold required for El Hishri to stand trial. Refugees in Libya was present in The Hague with survivors, affected communities and supporters. Around the hearing, we organised public actions and discussions intended to ensure that the courtroom proceedings were not separated from the communities whose experiences had made them possible. The hearing belonged to a legal process governed by its own evidentiary standards and procedural rules, but what was being examined inside the Court concerned experiences that people outside it had carried for years.
On 16 July 2026, Pre-Trial Chamber I unanimously confirmed all 17 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes and committed El Hishri to trial. The Chamber found substantial grounds to believe that he was responsible for the crimes charged, the evidentiary threshold applicable at the confirmation stage. The decision drew upon a substantial record that included witness evidence from 63 individuals, 47 of whom were former detainees. Confirmation did not constitute a finding of guilt. El Hishri remains presumed innocent, and the Prosecution will have to prove any charge beyond reasonable doubt at trial. But the decision was nevertheless a decisive development: every charge presented for confirmation survived judicial scrutiny, and the first case arising from the ICC’s Libya Situation moved into the trial phase.
For survivors, that distinction between confirmation and conviction is important, but so is the significance of reaching this stage at all. International criminal proceedings often move through years of investigation, jurisdictional disputes, arrest efforts and procedural litigation without a suspect ever reaching the courtroom. In this case, evidence gathered over years resulted in a warrant; Germany executed it; the accused was surrendered; survivors participated; a contested confirmation hearing took place; and the Chamber concluded that the case should proceed on all 17 charges. None of those steps guarantees the outcome of the eventual trial, but together they demonstrate what an accountability process can become when evidence, judicial action, state cooperation and survivor participation converge.
The case has continued to develop since confirmation. On 20 July 2026, the ICC Presidency constituted Trial Chamber VII to conduct the proceedings, and the Chamber scheduled its first status conference for 3 September 2026. On 25 August, the Prosecution and Defence jointly proposed 8 June 2027 as the date on which the trial should begin, together with a timetable for the principal preparatory steps that would precede it. That date has not yet been formally fixed by Trial Chamber VII and remains a proposal for the Chamber to decide. At the same time, the Defence continues to challenge the Court’s jurisdiction. After Pre-Trial Chamber I rejected that challenge on 15 July, an appeal was authorised and the Defence filed its appeal brief on 28 August 2026. The case is therefore now proceeding simultaneously through trial preparation before Trial Chamber VII and jurisdictional litigation before the Appeals Chamber.
The movement towards trial does not make the wider struggle around Mitiga complete. El Hishri is one accused person within a detention system involving many actors, chains of command and institutions, and the charges before the Court concern a defined period and body of conduct rather than everything that survivors have described about Mitiga. Other alleged perpetrators remain outside ICC custody, including Almasri. Nor does the inclusion of refugees and migrants among those affected by crimes at Mitiga resolve the broader accountability gap concerning the distinct system of detention, trafficking, exploitation, interception and return directed against refugees and migrants across Libya. The El Hishri case is significant precisely because it shows that complex crimes inside Libyan detention structures can be investigated and brought before judges; that success increases rather than reduces the expectation that other parts of the same system will be pursued.
What the case has already changed is the distance between testimony and consequence. For years, people who survived Mitiga were asked to remember what happened, identify those involved and explain structures that international institutions were only beginning to understand. Some did so without knowing whether the information would ever leave an investigative file. The El Hishri proceedings have moved part of that record into an adversarial judicial process in which evidence can be challenged, victims can participate and an accused person can answer allegations before independent judges.
That achievement does not belong to a single organisation or institution. It depends first on those who survived and spoke, including people who did so while still living with insecurity and displacement; on families who continued asking what had happened to those who disappeared; on investigators who preserved and tested evidence; on lawyers who converted that record into arguments capable of being presented before the Court; and on institutions and states that performed the responsibilities necessary for the proceedings to move forward. Refugees in Libya’s role forms part of that larger chain, connecting affected communities with a process that can otherwise remain distant from the people whose lives it concerns.
The contrast with Almasri is therefore not simply rhetorical. Both cases arise from allegations connected to Mitiga, both required the cooperation of European States Parties and both tested whether an ICC warrant could produce an actual judicial process. In one case, the suspect was arrested and then returned to Libya. In the other, the arrest was followed by surrender, participation, confirmation of charges and preparation for trial. The law did not become stronger between the two cases. What changed was whether the state holding the suspect carried its obligation through.
El Hishri is consequently both a breakthrough and a test. It demonstrates that the path from survivor testimony to an international trial is possible. The question that follows is whether that path will remain exceptional, or whether the same determination will be applied to the wider structures of criminality that survivors have been documenting for years.
El Hishri: Court-record chronology
3 Apr 2025
OTP applies for an arrest warrant against Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri.
10 Jul 2025
Pre-Trial Chamber I issues the warrant under seal.
16 Jul 2025
German authorities arrest El Hishri pursuant to the ICC warrant.
31 Jul 2025
Arrest warrant reclassified as public.
1 Dec 2025
Germany surrenders El Hishri to ICC custody in The Hague.
3 Dec 2025
El Hishri makes his first appearance before Pre-Trial Chamber I.
30 Apr 2026
Defence challenges the ICC’s jurisdiction under Article 19.
11 May 2026
Chamber issues its decision concerning victim participation and legal representation.
19–21 May 2026
Confirmation-of-charges hearing takes place over three days. Prosecutor, Common Legal Representatives of Victims and Defence make submissions.
15 Jul 2026
Pre-Trial Chamber I unanimously rejects the Defence’s jurisdiction challenge and confirms that the ICC may exercise jurisdiction.
16 Jul 2026
Pre-Trial Chamber I unanimously confirms all 17 charges and commits El Hishri to trial.
20 Jul 2026
ICC Presidency constitutes Trial Chamber VII to conduct the trial.
27 Jul 2026
Trial Chamber VII schedules the first status conference for 3 September 2026 and asks the parties and participants to make submissions on the trial commencement date and other pre-trial arrangements.
25 Aug 2026
Prosecution and Defence jointly propose that the trial commence on 8 June 2027. They also propose a series of intermediary deadlines for evidence, witness-related applications and other pre-trial matters. The proposed date has not yet been adopted by Trial Chamber VII.
3 Sep 2026
First status conference scheduled before Trial Chamber VII.
Proposed: 8 Jun 2027
First status conference scheduled before Trial Chamber VII.
Current status:
Trial phase — first status conference scheduled for 3 September 2026; Prosecution and Defence jointly propose 8 June 2027 for the start of trial.
The proposed trial date remains subject to approval by Trial Chamber VII. A Defence appeal concerning the Court’s jurisdiction is also pending.
The Unfinished Case: Crimes Against Refugees and Migrants
The movement of the El Hishri case towards trial is a major development, but it does not resolve the accountability gap that has shaped our engagement with the ICC for years. The proceedings concern serious crimes committed within Mitiga and include victims who were refugees and migrants, yet they do not amount to a dedicated prosecution of the wider system of violence directed specifically against people on the move across Libya. That distinction matters because the structures through which refugees and migrants are detained, transferred, exploited, intercepted and returned extend far beyond one prison, one commander or one period of time.
For years, the Office of the Prosecutor has recognised crimes against migrants and refugees as a priority within the Libya Situation. The difficulty is no longer whether those crimes have been identified as serious enough to warrant investigation. The difficulty is that recognition has not yet produced a public case capable of addressing the broader system in which refugees and migrants are subjected to arbitrary detention, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, enslavement, forced labour, extortion, killings and other forms of inhumane treatment across official facilities, informal places of captivity and trafficking structures.
The absence of such a case is increasingly difficult to separate from the way violence against refugees and migrants is framed. The same conduct is often fragmented into categories that make the underlying criminality appear narrower than it is. A person can be abducted and the discussion becomes trafficking. A person can be detained indefinitely and the language becomes migration management. A boat can be intercepted at sea and returned to Libya, while the legal analysis focuses on border control without fully confronting what happens after disembarkation. Those categories may describe parts of the reality, but they do not necessarily describe the whole crime. Where the evidence points to widespread or systematic attacks on a civilian population, international criminal law must be capable of examining the conduct at that level.
For refugees and migrants in Libya, captivity itself has become embedded in systems of profit and control. People may be arrested in the street or taken from their homes, transferred between detention facilities and armed actors, forced to pay for release, compelled to work, subjected to violence or sold onward, only to be detained again after another arrest or interception at sea. The boundary between state detention, armed-group control and trafficking is often not experienced by the person detained as a meaningful distinction. What matters is that the same body can move repeatedly through institutions and networks in which confinement, exploitation and violence remain constant.
That is why the investigative stream concerning refugees and migrants cannot be satisfied by prosecuting isolated acts while leaving the structure itself untouched. Accountability must be capable of asking who controls detention sites, who profits from captivity, who authorises or facilitates transfers, who commands those carrying out violence, who finances or sustains the relevant structures and how different actors interact across formal and informal systems. The legal categories may differ from case to case, but the investigation must be broad enough to capture the relationships through which the violence is organised.
The contradiction is especially stark because refugees and migrants in Libya are not an invisible population in evidentiary terms. Their experiences have been documented repeatedly by survivors, United Nations bodies, journalists, civil society organisations, researchers and international investigators. Testimonies describing detention, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, deaths and extortion have accumulated for years. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that people can become extensively documented without becoming meaningfully represented in prosecutions.
For survivors, that creates a particular form of exhaustion. People are repeatedly asked to describe what happened to them, identify those involved, remember dates and places, recount forms of violence and explain the structures they encountered. Their testimonies may appear in reports, investigations, legal submissions and advocacy materials, yet the path from documentation to accountability can remain unclear for years. A system in which survivors continually supply evidence while prosecutions remain absent risks reproducing another imbalance: institutions gain knowledge, while affected communities are left waiting for consequences.
The unfinished nature of this work is also visible in the fact that the crimes continue. Refugees and migrants are still arrested without meaningful judicial process, detained in abusive conditions, transferred between facilities and networks, subjected to extortion and violence and intercepted at sea before being returned to Libya. The structures adapt, personnel change, armed groups reorganise and official arrangements evolve, but the underlying vulnerability produced by detention, criminalisation and blocked escape routes remains. Accountability delayed in such a context does not only leave past crimes unanswered; it can help preserve the conditions in which new crimes become possible.
This is why the progress in El Hishri strengthens rather than weakens our demand for a dedicated prosecution strategy concerning crimes against refugees and migrants. His case demonstrates that evidence from Libyan detention structures can be organised into charges, tested before judges and moved towards trial. That achievement raises the expectation that the same seriousness will be applied to the broader systems affecting refugees and migrants across Libya, rather than allowing those crimes to remain permanently acknowledged but insufficiently prosecuted.
The question before the Court is therefore no longer whether refugees and migrants have suffered grave crimes in Libya. That has been documented too extensively to remain in doubt as a general factual reality. The question is whether the institutions of international justice are prepared to move from recognition to cases that identify responsibility at the level the violence demands.
For Refugees in Libya, that is the unfinished case. It is unfinished because the system remains active, because the evidence has not yet been matched by equivalent prosecutorial action, and because people whose suffering has been repeatedly documented are still waiting to see whether international criminal law will treat their lives with the same seriousness it claims to apply elsewhere.
No Double Standards: European Responsibility
The accountability gap does not end at Libya’s borders. If the violence against refugees and migrants is understood as part of a system rather than as a series of disconnected abuses, then responsibility must also be examined beyond the places where detention, torture or interception physically occur.
For years, European governments and institutions have supported policies designed to prevent refugees and migrants from reaching European territory by strengthening Libya’s capacity to intercept people at sea and keep them within the country. That cooperation has developed while the consequences of return to Libya have been repeatedly documented. The legal question is therefore not simply who commits the final act of violence inside a detention centre or aboard an interception vessel, but whether other actors knowingly contribute to structures through which those crimes are made possible, sustained or repeated.
This is one of the reasons our work with ECCHR has consistently looked beyond the immediate perpetrators. In its Article 15 Communication to the International Criminal Court, ECCHR presented material concerning the role of European Union institutions, agencies and Member States in the interception of refugees and migrants at sea and their return to Libya. The Communication examines forms of political, financial and operational cooperation involving Libyan actors and European authorities, including support for interception capacity, surveillance and the transmission of information used to locate boats. It advances the argument that these relationships must be examined in connection with what follows interception: return to a country where refugees and migrants face a documented risk of arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, enslavement and other grave abuses.
Our own engagement has taken that question further through survivor-led documentation, legal cooperation and the June 2025 joint position paper with ECCHR. There we called on the Office of the Prosecutor to investigate European actors where the evidence raises credible questions about their contribution to crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction. This is not the same as asserting that any particular European official, institution or agency has already been found criminally responsible. No such conclusion should be presumed in advance of an investigation and judicial process. But the absence of a conviction cannot become a reason not to investigate. Where evidence points towards possible forms of assistance, facilitation, coordination or other contributions recognised by international criminal law, those questions should be examined according to the same legal standards applied elsewhere.
The distinction matters because international criminal responsibility does not necessarily end with the person physically carrying out an abusive act. Mass violence can depend upon decisions taken elsewhere: resources can be provided, operations coordinated, surveillance shared, policies designed and capacities built by actors who never enter the place where the eventual crime occurs. Whether such conduct reaches the threshold of individual criminal responsibility is a legal question that must be determined through evidence. What we reject is the assumption that this inquiry should stop automatically once the chain of conduct reaches European institutions or officials.
The system of interception and return makes that problem particularly visible. European migration policy has increasingly relied upon preventing departures or ensuring that people intercepted in the Central Mediterranean do not reach European territory. Libya has become central to that strategy. European resources, training, equipment and technical support have helped strengthen Libyan interception capacity, while European surveillance systems can identify boats and communicate their location to Libyan actors. The people intercepted are then returned to Libya, where the risk of detention and serious abuse has been known for years. The geographical separation between European decision-making and violence inside Libya cannot by itself resolve the question of responsibility. Distance does not erase causation, knowledge or contribution where the legal elements of responsibility can otherwise be established.
This is why we have repeatedly challenged the language through which interception is presented as protection or rescue when its predictable consequence is return to captivity. Whether a particular operation meets the legal definition of rescue cannot be determined by the fact that people were removed from a boat alone. The destination, the actors involved and the foreseeable consequences of return also matter. A policy designed principally to prevent arrival in Europe cannot be insulated from scrutiny merely because another authority carries out the physical interception.
The Almasri case made the contradiction between European containment policy and European cooperation with international justice especially visible. Italy had spent years participating in policies aimed at preventing refugees and migrants from leaving Libya and reaching Europe. In January 2025, however, the direction of movement was reversed: an alleged perpetrator sought by the International Criminal Court was already in Italian custody, and the Italian state organised his return to Libya rather than completing the process that could have led to his surrender in The Hague. The circumstances of that case have their own legal history and should not be collapsed into the wider question of European complicity, but politically the contrast was impossible to ignore. European states have developed significant operational capacity to control the movement of refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean, yet state cooperation proved fragile when international criminal justice required an alleged perpetrator to move in the opposite direction.
Our concern therefore extends beyond individual operations to the policy structures that shape them. Agreements between Italy and Libya, European funding for Libyan migration control, support for interception capacity, aerial surveillance and the externalisation of border enforcement all form part of a larger architecture that should be examined in light of its consequences. Different legal proceedings address different parts of that architecture. Our case concerning Frontex before the Court of Justice of the European Union raises questions about the Agency’s aerial surveillance and the transmission of information used in interceptions. Y v. Italy before the European Court of Human Rights concerns the consequences for a survivor of Italy’s handling of the Almasri arrest. Our engagement with the ICC raises a different and more specific question: whether conduct by European officials or other actors may, where the evidence and legal requirements are met, amount to participation in crimes falling within the jurisdiction of the Court.
These proceedings should not be confused with one another, nor should the existence of litigation be treated as proof of criminal responsibility. Their significance lies in the fact that accountability is beginning to examine different levels of the same broader system rather than limiting scrutiny to those at the point where violence becomes most visible. International criminal law is concerned precisely with structures of responsibility, and those structures can cross institutions and borders.
For us, equality before international justice requires that this possibility be taken seriously. We do not demand that European actors be prosecuted because they are European. We demand that they not be protected from investigation because they are European. The distinction is essential. The purpose of an investigation is to determine responsibility, not to assume it, but the decision about who is worthy of investigation cannot itself be governed by political convenience.
The credibility of international criminal justice would be gravely weakened if accountability repeatedly travelled towards African detention centres, armed groups and commanders while the conduct of institutions and officials outside the continent remained beyond comparable scrutiny. The Rome Statute does not contain one standard for a Libyan commander and another for a European official. If the evidence points towards conduct capable of engaging individual criminal responsibility, the same law must be applied irrespective of nationality, institutional affiliation or the political influence of the state involved.
Our demand is therefore not for an expanded form of justice directed against Europe. It is for the ordinary promise of international justice to be applied consistently: follow the evidence, determine individual responsibility according to law and allow neither geography nor political power to decide in advance where accountability must stop.
What We Are Asking of the International Criminal Court
The concerns set out above lead to a clear set of expectations. Our engagement with the International Criminal Court is not only about identifying failures or pointing to unresolved areas of the Libya Situation. It is also about insisting on what the Court should do next. In our June 2025 joint position paper with ECCHR, we set out four central demands that continue to guide our position: the Libya investigation must remain open while serious crimes continue; the Office of the Prosecutor must build cases concerning crimes committed against refugees and migrants; credible evidence concerning European actors must be investigated; and complementarity must lead to genuine accountability rather than becoming another route through which responsibility is deferred.
The first of these concerns the future of the Libya investigation itself. The Court should not move towards an artificial completion of investigative activities while the circumstances that gave rise to its intervention remain present. Libya’s acceptance in May 2025 of ICC jurisdiction over alleged Rome Statute crimes committed through the end of 2027 widened the temporal space in which the Court can act. That should strengthen the possibility of accountability, not coincide with a retreat from investigation. New evidence may emerge, structures of command may change, alleged perpetrators may acquire or lose power, and continuing crimes may reveal relationships that were not previously visible. The Office of the Prosecutor must retain the capacity to respond to those developments rather than treating the Situation as if its essential questions have already been answered.
The second demand is that the investigative stream concerning crimes against refugees and migrants must move from recognition towards cases. This is not a call for symbolic attention or another acknowledgement that serious abuses have occurred. It is a demand for prosecutorial action where the evidence meets the requirements of the Rome Statute. The years of documentation surrounding detention, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, forced labour, killings, extortion and other abuses cannot remain indefinitely within an investigative category that produces no dedicated public case. The Court should identify those most responsible, examine the structures through which these crimes are organised and seek warrants where the evidentiary and legal thresholds are met.
That investigation must be capable of reaching beyond the immediate perpetrator. A meaningful examination of crimes against refugees and migrants requires attention to command structures, detention authorities, financial and logistical relationships, trafficking networks where they intersect with international crimes, and the systems through which people are intercepted, returned, transferred and confined. Responsibility cannot be reduced to the person physically present at the moment of abuse if the evidence points towards others whose decisions, orders, assistance or control made the crime possible. The Court’s mandate is particularly important because those bearing the greatest responsibility may be the least likely to face effective proceedings through ordinary domestic mechanisms.
The same principle applies where evidence leads outside Libya. We continue to ask the Office of the Prosecutor to examine the role of European actors without presuming in advance what that investigation should conclude. ECCHR’s Article 15 Communication and our subsequent joint work have raised serious questions concerning European financial, political and operational involvement in systems of interception and return. Those questions should be tested through investigation and law. If the evidence does not establish the elements of individual criminal responsibility, that conclusion should emerge from a genuine examination of the evidence. What cannot be acceptable is for politically powerful actors to remain outside meaningful scrutiny without that examination taking place.
Our fourth demand concerns complementarity. The ICC is a court of last resort, and national jurisdictions retain the primary responsibility to investigate and prosecute crimes falling within the Rome Statute. But that principle only has meaning where domestic proceedings are genuine. The existence of a national investigation on paper is not enough if it does not reach those responsible, if alleged perpetrators remain protected by institutions of power, or if proceedings are used principally to prevent international jurisdiction from being exercised. The Court must assess complementarity according to what national systems actually do, not according to declarations of intent.
The Almasri case demonstrated why this matters. The presence of domestic processes, claims of Libyan investigative activity and procedural arguments in Italy did not produce his surrender to the ICC. Instead, he was returned to Libya and remains outside the Court’s custody. The El Hishri case demonstrated the opposite: when cooperation is carried through and a suspect is surrendered, judicial proceedings can move forward. These experiences show that complementarity and cooperation must ultimately be judged by whether they bring international crimes within the reach of justice rather than leaving them permanently suspended between jurisdictions.
Across all of these demands runs another expectation that cannot be treated as separate from the substance of the cases: survivors must be able to participate meaningfully in the processes built partly upon their evidence. Participation does not mean that affected communities determine the outcome of a criminal case, nor does it remove the rights of the Defence or the independence of the judges. It means that people whose experiences form part of the factual foundation of proceedings should not remain at the margins of an institution acting in their name. Outreach, access to information, legal representation, interpretation and protection must be treated as integral parts of justice, particularly for refugees and migrants whose displacement and insecurity can make engagement with the Court exceptionally difficult.
We also expect the Court to investigate upward. International criminal justice loses much of its purpose if it reaches only those easiest to arrest or those closest to the physical act of violence. Guards, interrogators and direct perpetrators may bear serious responsibility, but the structures in which they operate also require examination. Commanders, political authorities, those controlling detention systems, actors organising or financing criminal structures and others whose contributions meet the legal requirements of the Rome Statute must not disappear from view simply because their involvement is less visible than the violence itself.
None of these expectations requires the Court to abandon legal standards or to prosecute in response to political pressure. The opposite is true. We are asking the ICC to apply its own standards consistently: to investigate where credible evidence exists, to seek warrants where the legal thresholds are satisfied, to assess national proceedings genuinely, to follow responsibility across institutional and geographic boundaries and to ensure that political difficulty does not determine the limits of prosecutorial attention.
We continue to make these demands because the progress already achieved in the Libya Situation demonstrates that the Court can act. The El Hishri proceedings show what becomes possible when investigation, cooperation and survivor participation are brought together. That success should not become the endpoint of the Libya Situation. It should establish the standard against which the unfinished parts of the investigation are measured.
Our expectation is therefore not that the International Criminal Court promise justice in the abstract. It is that the Court use the powers it already possesses with consistency, independence and equal seriousness across the entire Situation in Libya.
Documents & Legal Resources
Latest Developments
&
Media Coverage
This section follows developments in the ICC’s Libya Situation, the cases in which Refugees in Libya is directly engaged, our work with survivors and legal partners, and the wider debate over accountability for crimes committed against refugees and migrants.
It also brings together selected reporting, interviews and analysis documenting the struggle around these proceedings — from the arrest and return of Almasri, to the prosecution of Khaled El Hishri, survivor participation before the Court, and our continuing demand that European responsibility be investigated with the same seriousness.
Latest Developments
In the Media
The struggle for accountability has also unfolded publicly.
Journalists and international media have followed the experiences of survivors, Refugees in Libya’s engagement with international justice, the work carried out with ECCHR, the Almasri controversy in Italy, the El Hishri proceedings and the wider question of why crimes against refugees and migrants have remained so resistant to prosecution.
We collect this coverage as part of the public history of the struggle for justice. Media attention have proven to disappear quickly, but the cases do not, and neither do the survivors or the responsibility to continue asking what happened, who was responsible and what the institutions entrusted with accountability are doing about it.
Latest Media
The New Humanitarian
Landmark ICC trial on Libya migrant abuses must lead to more scrutiny of EU complicity
Allison West and Viola Castellano argue that the El Hishri trial must become a gateway to scrutiny of the wider detention system and the potential responsibility of EU and Member State officials.
25 Aug 2026
Justice Cannot Be Selective
Our engagement with the International Criminal Court has taught us both what international justice can make possible and how fragile that possibility remains. We have seen an arrest warrant frustrated when a state chose not to carry cooperation through to surrender, and we have seen another case move from investigation to arrest, surrender, confirmation of charges and preparation for trial when cooperation was fulfilled. We have seen survivors enter proceedings that once seemed impossibly distant, while other crimes affecting refugees and migrants continue to wait for the same level of prosecutorial attention.
For Refugees in Libya, this is why the ICC cannot be judged only by the existence of cases or the language of accountability. Its legitimacy depends on whether the law is applied consistently, whether states respect their obligations, whether survivors are able to participate meaningfully and whether investigations are prepared to follow responsibility beyond the most visible perpetrators. International justice loses its meaning when political power determines whose conduct is investigated, whose warrant is executed or whose suffering is permitted to remain indefinitely within an investigative file.
We will continue to engage with the Court because the struggle for accountability in Libya is not finished. Crimes continue, survivors continue to come forward, evidence continues to emerge and structures that have enabled those crimes remain active. Progress such as the El Hishri case demonstrates that justice is possible, but it cannot become a substitute for pursuing what remains unresolved.
Our role is not to stand outside these processes waiting for institutions to decide what justice should look like. We will continue documenting, investigating, supporting survivors, working with legal partners, challenging failures of cooperation and demanding scrutiny wherever the evidence leads. The purpose is not simply to bring more cases before international courts. It is to ensure that accountability reaches the systems, institutions and individuals whose power has allowed these crimes to continue.
The promise of international criminal justice is equality before the law. For that promise to mean anything, it must apply when the accused is easy to prosecute and when the questions become politically difficult; when responsibility lies inside Libya and when evidence points beyond it; when the victims are citizens and when they are refugees, migrants or people whose lives have too often been treated as politically expendable.
Justice cannot be selective.