On 16 October, 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. Their case is based on six years of investigation, interviews with more than 70 senior European officials, minutes of high-level European Council meetings and other confidential documents. It follows a previous request to the ICC’s prosecutor’s office – filed in 2019 and admitted in 2020 as part of the ICC’s Libya investigation – 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.
