[Translator's note: The author speaks of the third crime, which was Operation Mare Nostrum and collaboration with the Libyan militias]

The closure of the boats of immigrants trying to seek refuge in the EU by pushing back towards Turkey, while the only rescue boat being tried in the Mediterranean reaches the European Chamber of immigrants trying to reach the European Parliament, is a revolt and police repression in the administrative detention centres of Mesnil-Amelot and Vincennes. In the French Administrative Detention Centres (AAZ), on the border between Greece and Turkey, between Libya and Italy, the first victims of the support measures required by the pandemic are actually exiled, as these situations remain unconditioned in order to be able to comply with these measures. Confinement, repression, exclusion and death is the EU preparing to commit a third crime against humanity in immigrants?

Let's work memory. In October 2013, two thousand exiled boats, men and women, sank off the coast of the island of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily.Despite the fact that the guards of the Italian coast prolonged a (late) hand, most died. The Italian government responded to this tragedy by launching operation Mare Nostrum: over 100,000 people at risk in the Mediterranean were rescued, received by Italy and treated as asylum seekers in one year.

We know what happened with the abolition of this human hospitality. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), in 2019 alone, 1283 exiled people died in an attempt to travel to a country in the European Union. This was the case because in 2014 the Italian Government was forced to abandon the rescue and protection operation being carried out in Italy. Instead of Mare Nostrum, the Frontex Plus programme came into force. Frontex is the military control programme for the southern border established and managed by the European Union.

The repressive closure of EU borders for migrants took place in the ways we know: the fortified walls and fences in the east and west of the EU, the electronic and police control of sea crossings from Libya and Turkey, the large-scale operations to extend EU borders also outside Europe, such as the agreement signed in Turkey in 2016, or the majority of Syrian refugees.

At the same European borders, we have seen how discriminatory classification centres have been set up in critical areas, in hostposts; in Greece, they have become the large reception districts for refugees who do not want to accept in the other EU countries. Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovenia, etc., had joined the external borders, and firewood beams had been erected.

And what about the legal constraints imposed on the work of NGOs operating efficiently in the Mediterranean? In France we can cite the hunting of migrants organised on the French-Italian border (in Ventimiglia, in the Roya Valley or on the slopes of the mountains near Briançon), and the repression suffered in Calais by exiles trying to reach Britain; and we cannot fail to mention the repression suffered by migrants who survive in conditions of promiscuity and inadmissibility. Those who try to help people in extreme precariousness at risk of falling under the accusation of criminalising solidarity.

Returning to the centre of the Mediterranean and at the end of 2013, the fact is that, once the Mare Nostrum operation is completed, the close cooperation between the EU and a consortium of Libyan militias has led, in the new shipwreck known, to the death of at least 14,000 people, to which must be added the possible disappearance of tens of thousands of exiles. In addition, the result of this collaboration has been the forcible transfer to Libya of 50,000 forced migrants to flee war, repression and misery, included in concentration camps, where systematic torture, violence, slavery, executions and the treatment of people have become commonplace.

This double issue has determined the long period of three years of investigation carried out by Omer Shatz, an expert in the rights of refugees at the Institute for Political Research in Paris and Juan Branko, a former assistant to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In June, both investigators presented at the same Court a 250-page substantiated notification accusing the leaders of the European Union of a crime against humanity and filing a complaint against them.

In fact, Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC (1998.7.17) also considers as crimes against humanity “other similar acts devoid of humanity (murder, deportation, slavery, torture, persecution and Apr) intentionally provoked and causing much suffering or serious harm to physical integrity or mental or physical health.” This definition is particularly appropriate for the step taken by the EU with the resumption, for the third time, of the policy of expulsion or forced confinement of migrants in the face of the threat of the pandemic.

In any case, to finish listening, Giusi Nicolini, who was Mayor of Lampedusa in 2013 at the University of Geneva, closed his speech last October: “It is possible to fight this terrible humanitarian emergency differently. Not only crying and forgetting, but accepting these people as subjects of rights, on their lands and during their migratory route, trampled on in the camps in Libya and today also on the sea. Only in this way will we be able to respond politically to the complexity of the challenge, which is long and difficult, tiring and demanding.”

* Claude Calame is director of the Ecole des hautes études de Paris, member of ATTAC. The article has been published in the journal Viento Sur and has been translated into Basque by Joseba Barriola.