The Almasri affair: Europe’s self-defeating fight against human trafficking

Osama Almasri Najim: the name may not mean anything to you, but it is well known in Italy. This Libyan police chief is the target of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role overseeing horrific prison camps in Tripoli, which were the scenes of murder, torture and sexual violence. None of this prevented the suspect from being released by the Italian police and sent back to his country just a few days after his arrest in Turin.

The affair goes all the way to the top of the Italian government, as Filippo Gozzo explains for Euronews in an excellent exposé that traces Almasri's movements and the suspicions now hanging over the Italian government.

Domani has compiled the various responses of Italian NGOs and politicians to the story. The Italian daily offers a concise and damning précis of the situation: “The appeals made to the government by the opposition and by NGOs working in sea rescue – that it hand over to The Hague the Libyan general in charge of detention centres from which there have been reports of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment – have been to little avail.”

For Mediterranea Saving Humans (MSH), a sea-rescue NGO, the apparent favour granted by the Italian government to the Tripoli police chief amounts to “shameful protection". This person was wanted for crimes against humanity, human trafficking and torture – and then simply released? The case, says MSH, reveals the hypocrisy of the Italian executive, which claims to be combating trafficking with its migration policies.

In a similarly merciless editorial published in Il Manifesto, Andrea Fabozzi offers a response to the government’s position:

“What the ICC deems to be a perpetrator is for the Italian government a worthy accomplice. [...] A protagonist of this ‘deadly policy’ [...] by which the faucet of migration from Libya to Italy is opened or closed, and migrants risk dying of torture in detention centres on the continent or drowning at sea, all based on a logic of pure profit and blackmail.

Everything is in writing, everything is known. In addition to the reports and indictments of the International Criminal Court, there are videos, photos, thousands of testimonies. The most terrible violence is the norm in Libya's detention centres."

Fabozzi flags up the Italian PM’s apparent hypocrisy:

“The premier, Giorgia Meloni, promised to launch a worldwide hunt for human traffickers, but she merely arrests a few desperate survivors at sea, labelled as 'traffickers'. The real criminals are protected and sent home, on condition that they continue their work. In silence."

The migrant trafficker, a convenient enemy

The migrant trafficker is the quasi-mythical figure who underpins all European migration policies. Curbing migration is presented as a way of stopping human trafficking and thus saving lives. This was the ostensible aim of a draft directive presented by the European Commission on 28 November 2023. But is that text fit for purpose? A study by Professor Violeta Moreno-Lax (of INCREA-Universitat de Barcelona and Queen Mary University of London) questions its intent and content.

Moreno-Lax makes a number of specific recommendations: to shelve the directive until a more in-depth examination has been carried out; to realign its text with the UN’s definition of human trafficking; to clarify the legal vocabulary it uses to describe trafficking and the people accused of it; and to protect NGOs in their role as bona-fide service providers.

It is not just the double standards (applied at national and international level) that are open to such criticisms. Our whole institutional approach to human trafficking may be at fault. As the researcher and journalist David L Suber writes in openDemocracy, the battle waged on the practice is very often counter-productive:

“Counter-smuggling policies fail because they’re not actually trying to stop smuggling. They’re trying to stop migration. To equate the two, or to assume that to deter one is to deter the other, is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem.”

For Suber, the outcome of these policies is to make migratory routes more dangerous and traffickers even more necessary. But the increased risks are ineffective at discouraging migrants.

“We should – and we can – do things differently”, he writes, hopefully:

“Highly securitised and rights-violating migration policies should not be inevitable. They consume valuable resources that could be redirected towards ensuring safe migration pathways, as well as meeting the security concerns of states.”

“But for any of this to change, we must take the first step of acknowledging that smuggling becomes a necessary phenomenon in a world where movement has been criminalised.”

Like it or not, human traffickers perform an essential function for people fleeing war, famine and persecution, says Suber. “And no matter how dangerous the path before them is, [those people] will try.”

Obviously, there is no question of offering amnesty to criminals who take advantage of the distress of exiles. Neither should we condone the degrading and murderous practices going on in Libya’s prison camps. Instead, we need to ask ourselves another question: who are we attacking when we criminalise migration? The perpetrators or their victims?