Us
The JLProject is a collective that conducts forensic investigations to legally assist people who are captured at sea and pushed back to Libya.
Open Rights is a non-profit organization (ETS) founded in 2024 to promote human rights through research, documentation, and advocacy projects.
The project
Josi and Loni Project (JLP) and Sciabaca & Oruka (ASGI) have been helping migrants who were illegally captured at sea and pushed back into Libyan detention camps to claim their rights before the appropriate judicial authorities for years. Over 600 victims have already been identified, and some of these cases, which have been reconstructed and documented, have gone to court and already achieved justice.
But more can—and must—be done. We want to show that these injustices and acts of violence are a direct consequence of Italian and European migration policies, which for too many years have been building a system aimed at systematically denying the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups like asylum seekers, through the externalization of border control. Furthermore, as extensively documented by numerous investigations conducted by independent bodies, these policies also fuel human trafficking by providing traffickers with political legitimacy and substantial economic resources.
The collaboration between JLProject and OpenRights was born to document this reality in the most detailed way possible, in order to highlight the need for and urgency of a radical rethinking of Italy’s and the European Union’s migration policies.
What is needed? More people. More identified pushback victims, but also more investigators capable of gathering evidence, more lawyers, more researchers, more volunteers and supporters.
The database of pushbacks to Libya is a large online calendar with around 1,000 documented cases starting from 2018. These pushbacks have led to the deportation of tens of thousands of migrants to Libyan detention camps, exposing them to the risk of serious violations of their fundamental rights.
To demonstrate these violations, it is necessary to find evidence of the illegality of the pushback, track down the individuals who were pushed back, and chronologically reconstruct the events through photographic material, aerial traces, other public data, institutional documents collected online, and direct testimonies from those who were pushed back. This is a task that our team of investigators knows how to do and can accomplish.
Un esempio di ricostruzione caso
The project objectives
The general objective of the project is to contribute to the analysis of Italian and European migration policies from a human rights perspective, to facilitate the understanding of their results and effects, and to remove those factors that lead to serious and systematic violations of fundamental rights.
Specific objectives include:
Facilitating the judicial determination of serious human rights violations against refugees, asylum seekers, and foreign nationals fleeing their countries of origin or transit, who attempt to reach European shores, and helping ensure their effective access to the right to international protection.
Documenting and providing a detailed historical testimony of the systematic violations of international human rights law along migration routes to Europe.
Another expected outcome is a significant increase in legal support that can be offered to victims of collective pushbacks to assert their rights before the appropriate authorities. This will involve expanding collaborations with other law firms and beyond.
The documentary potential of this material should also attract the interest of other professionals: legal operators of various kinds, social science researchers, historians, etc., who could use it for research aimed at providing an ex-post evaluation of Italian and European migration policies.
Additionally, thanks to the website, it will be easier for migrants to contribute with their direct experiences and enrich the database with new testimonies.
