How to get away with organised crime
While rescuers were accused of supporting the business of unscrupulous criminals who supposedly endanger migrants’ lives purely for profit, real criminals were being funded and legitimized by those same states. The journalist Nancy Porsia has exposed how Italy and the EU funneled millions in off-the-books cash to Libyan militias. These were the same armed group illegally detaining migrants, torturing them for ransom, then intercepting them at sea to return them to the same detention camps they had escaped: a cycle of abuse with no exit.
This was no secret to Italy’s anti-Mafia directorate and Frontex, Europol, and other law enforcement agencies. Yet the prosecutors who spearheaded the crackdown on NGOs never opened a case into this evidence. They had other targets.
Efforts towards accountability have always come from those who survived the camps, the crossings, the torture. Through their efforts, on 19 May 2026, for the first time in history, a Libyan suspect accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes will appear before the International Criminal Court.
Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, alleged to have been one of the most senior Mitiga Prison officials, where thousands of persons were detained, is suspected of 17 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed between 1 May 2014 and 30 June 2020.
These crimes encompassed: imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, outrages upon personal dignity, cruel treatment, torture, and other inhumane acts committed against detainees principally at Mitiga Prison; and rape and other forms of sexual violence, murder, attempted murder, enslavement, and persecution of certain persons principally at Mitiga Prison.
The Confirmation of Charges hearing not simply a legal milestone – it is a confrontation with a structure that has enjoyed impunity for far too long.
This case exists because we, the survivors, refused silence. We spoke under threat, carried the evidence, and endured repeated interceptions, detentions, tortures, enslavement, rapes, and systematic dehumanization. We built the very places where we were imprisoned. Yes! We know the perpetrators. We know the system.
We demand justice. Rescue at sea saves lives, but without accountability, the conditions producing deaths at sea and in torture camps designed to contain people seeking safety will continue. Every interception, every forced return, every detention center, every act of violence – these, as you know, are not isolated incidents. They are the direct outcome of policies funded, coordinated, and sustained by European states.
Before the crackdown on search-and-rescue groups, another, quieter, campaign had been ongoing: one that treated asylum-seekers as criminals. Prosecutors needed someone to parade to public opinion as the result of what they proclaimed to be their “fight against human trafficking.” So they started pulling people from the same boats that had just been rescued and charging them with the wildest possible crimes: accusing them of being as selfish collaborators, the alleged leaders of smuggling networks, human trafficking kingpins or even ringleaders of ISIS cells.
In Italy, most of these cases had something in common: the suspects were picked up aboard military rescue ships. Just as the case against us rested on the conspiratorial ramblings of ex- and current cops, the cases against them relied on the coerced testimonies of traumatized shipwreck survivors, still on the high seas and surrounded by soldiers. They were promised a residence permit if they “collaborated,” or threatened with prison if they didn’t.
Keeping rescue in the hands of armed law enforcement – and cutting civilians out – was a pillar of the system. NGOs, on the other hand, offered care, explained rights, treated survivors as people, not suspects.
Our refusal to collaborate with this machinery of mass incarceration (by withholding photos and any so-called “evidence” from law enforcement) became central to the state’s case against us. We had disrupted their system: a machine that fed on fear and produced more of it. Fear of a phantom enemy: the torturer, the "trafficker", the terrorist steering a dinghy. The enemy we were accused of helping. The enemy the European public needed to believe in to justify a profitable war on migration. It is rare for a white European aid worker to spend even a single night in jail. But in the meanwhile, thousands of people on the move have disappeared into prisons, convicted on fabricated charges and silenced without solidarity.
While this machinery produced thousands of criminal proceedings across Europe for acts of mutual aid and solidarity, and locked thousands of people away in prisons, not a single senior European official has ever been held accountable: neither for the organized system of illegal pushbacks and arbitrary detention, nor for the cooperation with torturers and the mass abandonment at sea that defined European migration policy for years. They have acted with impunity throughout.
On this foundation, a new legal order is being built: one that suspends rights and dismantles accountability in the name of border enforcement. A permanent state of exception, born at sea and repackaged for use at home.
And the stakes extend far beyond Europe’s borders. The Mediterranean has become a laboratory for techniques of surveillance, containment, and dehumanization that circulate globally. Technologies used to monitor and criminalize migration routes were refined through occupations and wars elsewhere – including in Palestine – before being deployed against people crossing the sea. Today, the alliances forged through border enforcement increasingly merge with military and security collaborations. Even the recent coordination between the Greek coast guard and Israeli forces in confronting the Gaza flotilla reveals how seamlessly these regimes now overlap.
Europe liked to present the Libyan Coast Guard as a partner it could direct and contain. Another outsourced instrument of deterrence. But once created, armed, financed, and legitimized, such forces develop their own momentum. Militias folded into coast guard structures, trafficking networks intertwined with state actors, detention economies built around disappearance and extortion: Europe did not simply collaborate with this machinery, it helped build it. And now it can no longer fully control what it set in motion. The violence escapes the institutions that authorized it, while still serving their political purpose. A machine like this does not stop once it has been normalized.
But the real danger is not only technological or juridical. It is moral. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil: the terrifying normality of people who learn to administer violence as routine. The coast guards flying surveillance drones, the officers pushing people back into the water, the guards beating people at Europe’s borders, the migrants coerced into policing and abusing other migrants – these are not monsters standing outside society. They are ordinary people shaped by it, trained within it, rewarded by it.
At the Poland-Belarus border, in the Mediterranean, in the forests and camps at Europe’s edges, images once thought unbearable have become familiar. People freezing in swamps. Bodies drifting at sea. Families trapped between armed patrols. And with every repetition comes the same unspoken lesson: we must learn to tolerate this. We must get used to these pictures. That is how the border regime corrupts society from within. Not only through the violence it inflicts on those excluded, but through the habits of indifference it demands from everyone else.
That is why the Iuventa case matters far beyond the Mediterranean. It marked a major step in the erosion of the European rule of law. We can say with confidence that international law was on our side when we rescued people. But we have also learned this: law alone protects no one. What matters is who can invoke it, and who has the power to erode it.
When, on 17 June 2026, the European Parliament waved through the new Return Regulation, the final piece of the Asylum Pact and one of the harshest migration laws in decades, dozens of far-right MEPs jumped to their feet, chanting "Send them back! Send them back!" Europe's fascist past has arrived at the political and legislative heart of its present.
Today's EU migration policy, drafted by the far right and carried through by the political centre, seeks to unite Europeans behind a vision of mass violence against Black and brown people.
It will almost certainly fail in its ostensible objectives: It will not bind the member states of the EU closer together or correct the inequalities between them; it will not stop people dying at sea; it will not safeguard "real" refugees. It will not stop those fleeing poverty, war, and crisis, reuniting with their families, or pursuing their dreams from looking to Europe for greater safety and a better life. And it will also fail in the implicit objectives of its strongest proponents: it will not deport hundreds of thousands of people, and it will not make Europe more white, or more Christian, or more prosperous, or more secure. It will fail in every single way, on everyone's terms.
What it will deliver: mass detention and suffering on a vast scale. More violations of human rights, more death, more trauma.
The signs had been there long before. In June 2025, the European Court of Human Rights declared inadmissible the application of a group of Nigerian and Ghanaian survivors who had sued Italy: the MRCC in Rome had coordinated their rescue and handed it over to the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, even though a vessel of the Italian navy was close by and the Sea-Watch 3 itself reached the scene shortly afterwards. Twenty people died, many were forcibly returned to Libya. Italy, the Court held, had exercised no "effective control" and therefore bore no responsibility.
Just six days later, a court in Palermo published its reasoning in a separate case: former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini had been acquitted of kidnapping charges after refusing for weeks to let a rescue ship disembark. The court concluded that Italy had been under no obligation to assign a port of safety to people rescued in international waters.
When these basic guarantees collapse, nobody is safe. Already, the juridical and political tools first honed against migrants are being turned against union organizers, climate activists, students, and dissidents. Witness the brutal crackdown on those who have stood in solidarity with Palestine and against genocide in Gaza.
That is why this fight matters. Because the injury done to the last among us always becomes an injury to us all.