The European Union’s cooperation on migration with the fractured North African nation of Libya is in the spotlight again after human rights lawyers filed the names of some 120 European leaders—including French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel—to the International Criminal Court, accusing them of committing crimes against humanity with migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
The group led by lawyers Omer Shatz and Juan Branco filed a 700-page legal brief on Thursday. The Associated Press has obtained a copy of the brief.
Their case is based on six years of investigation. It follows a previous request to the ICC’s prosecutor’s office to investigate European officials for migration policies they argued led to the interception, detention, torture, killing and drowning of tens of thousands of people trying to reach European shores.
Now, lawyers say they have identified dozens of European individuals, from high-level heads of state to lower-level bureaucrats, as “co-perpetrators” alongside Libyan suspects for the death of 25,000 asylum seekers and abuses against some 150,000 survivors who were “abducted and forcibly transferred to Libya, where they were detained, tortured, raped, and enslaved.”
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