The project

Over several years JLProject and Sciabaca & Oruka (ASGI) have brought to court numerous cases of people illegally captured at sea and pushed back to Libyan concentration camps. Over 600 men, women and children who have been subject to refoulement have been traced and their cases investigated. The first of these cases that have already been taken to court have resulted in VICTORY for those who have been pushed back¹.

But much more can be done. The ENTIRE illegal system of pushbacks in Libya can be challenged. Hundreds, if not thousands, of court cases can be filed to ask for financial compensation for the victims, and to allow those who are seeking asylum or other forms of legal protection to have their cases lawfully considered by the countries that have sought to evade responsibility by pushing them back to Libya.

What is needed to do this? In short, more people: more investigators able to find evidence of pushbacks, more victims of pushbacks traced and identified, more lawyers willing and able to bring the cases to court.  

To achieve these goals the JLProject, together with Sciabaca & Oruka (ASGI) and the Open Rights association will publish a database of migrant pushbacks to Libya occurring in the Central Mediterranean, with a detailed dossier of evidence for each incident that we have been able to identify and substantiate.

JLProject has already gathered comprehensive data from various open sources, which document approximately 800 pushbacks to Libya over the past 4 years, leading to the deportation of at least 105,000 men, women and children to Libyan detention centres.

But to bring these cases to court it is necessary to investigate case by case, by cross-referencing these data sources, to find evidence of the illegality of the pushback, to track down and interview the victims, to reconstruct the events and build a dossier of evidence. This is a job that JLProject is already doing, and we are already seeing the results in court. But now we need to think bigger: we estimate that it will take 6 months for a staff of 7 investigators and 2 technicians working full time to investigate all 800 incidents and build the evidence for those cases that can be taken to court.
Each case will contain all the evidence of the complicity of European Union States and/or Frontex in the pushback: chronological reconstruction, photographic material, air tracks, internal Frontex information on the joint operation Themis, etc.

All of this will be available to legal teams around the world to bring court cases against European governments that participated in these deliberate and repeated breaches of international law.
The site will be in English, and the material will be downloadable in both English and Italian, as we expect most of the cases will be brought against the Italian government, due to its leading role in directing and coordinating most pushback operations in the Central Mediterranean.

The JLProject

With legal representation from Sciabaca & Oruka (ASGI), built on JLProject’s investigations and evidence, 5 claimants recently won the first civil case against the Italiana government in relation to the infamous pushback incident involving the Asso Ventinove in 2018.

JLProject is a collective of 50 activists currently engaged in pro bono forensic investigations. It has already found sufficient evidence to bring 16 more pushback cases to court and is investigating a further 90 cases in which illegal pushbacks have been identified. More than 600 people pushed back to Libya have so far approached JLProject for help in asserting their rights.

For each case JLProject finds evidence on:

1. The illegality of the pushback (a pushback to Libya is illegal when it occurs in international or European waters and is carried out or coordinated by a European government, whose laws prohibit pushback to countries in which migrants may face fear of persecution or serious harm).
2. identification and presence in the case of one or more victims of the pushback.

In order for all those who have been subject to refoulement in the Central Mediterranean to get legal assistance on their cases, it would need a far greater number of lawyers willing to take on these cases.

The aims of the project

• To provide the evidence that lawyers representing victims of illegal pushbacks need in order to file thousands of lawsuits against the illegal system of capture at sea and pushbacks to violence, torture and detention in Libya, and the denial of the right to claim asylum.
• To consign the crime of illegal pushbacks to history. 
• To provide a document for future research and historical purposes recording the huge system of illegal capture at sea and deportation to Libyan detention centres of men, women and children, that Europe – and Italy first and foremost – has been managing and financing for years with near total impunity. This archive will be useful in the decades to come.
• To record the testimony of victims and give them the power to seek accountability: those who have been forcibly returned to Libya will be able to give their own accounts of their ordeals, and to get in touch with those who can help them assert their right to seek remedy. NGOs will also be able to submit new evidence to support their cases.

The database

Most of the evidence on the cases will be accessible to everyone. Personal data of the individuals who have been subject to pushback will not be visible on the publicly accessible database in order to protect the privacy and data rights of these individuals.

The portal will be in 2 languages: English and Italian, as we expect most of the cases will be brought against the Italian government, due to its leading role in directing and coordinating most pushback operations in the Central Mediterranean.

Once completed, the portal will be updated in real time and all users, and in particular NGOs at sea, will have the opportunity to contribute further evidence and information.

Each pushback case will contain:

Budget, time to complete, personnel required

The budget for investigating a single pushback incident is approximately 80 euros.

This budget includes the work of a JLProject investigator, who is responsible for finding evidence, classifying it and preparing the case dossier, and the work of the technician who uploads it to the portal. On average, we spend 8 hours (one working day) per case. This costs estimate also includes a part of the fixed costs of the site (server, investigation tools, etc.).

Any person or association can help our work by joining our crowdfunding: your contribution will directly fund the identification and investigation of unlawful refoulement by European and Libyan governments.

Using the portal

Much of the information that we rely on is already public. But no one has yet catalogued, aggregated and cross-referenced the information, in order to “join the dots” between these sources and present them in an easily accessible way. We do this. And this open source intelligence is then supported by the vital testimony that victims themselves and witnesses provide us with.

Using our database, a victim of pushback will be able to find his case and ask us for help. He can also help us find other people who were with him. JLProject, with only word of mouth, has already found 600 pushed-back people. After the portal goes online, it expects to find at least 6000.

Lawyers supporting a victim of pushback will be able to download all the evidence in the public section, and can contact us to request evidence/information in the closed section. Through the database lawyers will be able to access evidence that their client was present at the scene, communicate and share knowledge with other lawyers who are already following the pushback incident, or who have already filed a similar case in relation to the incident.

A researcher will be able to study the system of pushbacks in Libya in all its aspects. For example, they will be able to sift the data in order to view only the pushbacks carried out by a specific cargo ship or patrol boat, or to monitor which Libyan militias are most active in a given month and which Libyan detention centres are most used for deportations by sea. The database’s potential as a source of research data is immense.

1. Ad esempio hanno vinto in primo grado:
   – A giugno 2024 la causa di risarcimento contro il governo italiano intentata da 5 persone illegalmente respinte in Libia nel caso Asso Ventinove. Il tribunale ha riconosciuto un risarcimento di 15 mila euro a testa.
   – A settembre 2024 il ricorso intentato da un respinto che si trova ancora in Libia. Il giudice ha condannato l’Italia a concedere immediatamente un visto per far entrare il rifugiato in Italia. ↩︎