High-profile European politicians, including the EU’s former foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, Italy’s current and former interior ministers and the current and former prime ministers of Malta, have been named as the subjects of a criminal complaint at the international criminal court alleging they conspired with Libya’s coastguard to illegally push back refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
The criminal complaint, which was submitted at The Hague by the German NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), accuses the politicians of committing several “crimes against humanity in the form of the severe deprivation of physical liberty” between 2018 and 2021 by systematically intercepting boats in the Med and sending refugees back into detention in Libya.
