Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Janet: 00:10  Hi Steph, 

Stephanie: Hi Janet.

Introduction to the Walid Trial 

Janet: 00:11  Now it’s the end of November, and we’re going to put this one out in December. And Steph, you’ve spent a significant part of November covering a really big trial going on here in the Netherlands, haven’t you?

Stephanie: 00:23  Yeah, it was an extraordinary case, in the words of the judge in the court of Zwolle handling this trial.

Janet: 00:29  Zwolle? Zwolle? that’s a bit beyond the Randstad, where we usually are, The Hague, Amsterdam, et cetera. It’s probably somewhere our audience doesn’t know.

Stephanie: 00:40  Yes, I assume that our audience doesn’t know Zwolle is in the northeast of the Netherlands. If you’ve ever gone to Groningen, where I went to university, and I highly recommend you will pass Zwolle as a train station, and it’s a kind of a provincial hub. And the reason the trial was there was because the OM in Zwolle has like the specific regional interest in doing human trafficking cases. So just as war crimes cases tend to go to the Hague, terrorism cases go to Schiphol, human trafficking cases go to Zwolle.

Janet: 01:12  Okay, so tell us more about this trial. Who was on trial?

Stephanie: 01:16  On trial was 41 year old, Amanuel Walid, also known as Tewelde Goitom. He’s accused of managing detention camps, mainly one in Bani Waled, a town in Libya, where African migrants were held and tortured until their families in Europe and elsewhere paid ransoms of 1000s of US dollars. He is charged with being a member of a criminal organization involved in human trafficking, hostage taking, extortion and sexual violence, all happening between 2014 and 2018 in Libya. And he is Eritrean.

Janet: 01:52  And you say the judge described it as extraordinary. What made it extraordinary?

Stephanie: 01:58  It’s a massive case. It’s the biggest human trafficking case in the Netherlands, 

Janet: Maybe also in Europe ?

Stephanie: I don’t know, so I’m not going to say, but I know it’s the biggest in the Netherlands. 

Janet: Okay, well, somebody can write in and tell us.

Stephanie: It has over 30,000 pages of investigation, and that started already in 2018. Now the suspect in this case, has said from the beginning, actually, that this is a case of mistaken identities, and he denied ever being in Libya. But if he is found to be the same man that the prosecution says he is, namely Walid, he would be the highest profile trafficker ever to stand trial in Europe, according to experts who follow these kind of migration cases.

Janet: 02:40  So before we discuss even in more detail what the case really means, and some of the kind of the bigger implications, we’d like to, I think, start off with sharing some elements from it. It started on November 3rd, closed on November 26. My goodness, I do love it when a trial takes X number of days rather than X number of years, it’s short compared to international courts, and maybe you can describe more about how it all worked.

Stephanie: 03:11  Yeah, this makes it sound like you had hearings every day from November 3 until 26, but Dutch trials are very short and condensed, and so this was actually just seven days of hearings in total, and the court was expecting a lot of attention for this. They set up a live stream, and they had live interpretation into English and Tigrinya, and the judge said that over 1000 people followed online, and that was including me.

Janet: 03:38  And did we also get to hear from some of the victims in this short trial?

Stephanie: 03:43  But the way Dutch courts tend to happen is they don’t have a lot of live testimony, but they do have a judge who basically summarizes what victims have said in two investigative judges. But midway through the trial, we also had a moment, for victims were given a moment to speak, and in the first three days, we heard the summary of the judges who went through the witness statements, and there were about 30 witness statements included in the indictment. But on November 17, we heard the victims speak directly in a victim’s impact statement. We were not allowed to record, and the victims are very scared of being identified, so we’ll have an excerpt of their, one of their direct testimonies, and it’s being read by our colleague Alex. And this is a part where the victim describes arriving at the warehouse that is run by Walid.

Victim Statement read by Alex: 04:36  We got inside, and we saw divided into three parts. The first part was for the kidnapped people. The second part was for the people who hadn’t paid, and other people who had paid. They were waiting for a long time. And then there was a place where I had to stay, and we gathered. Walid would say to the kidnapped people, I bought you for $5,000, you have to repay me 5000. When we arrived there, there were two phones being brought in, and they told us that we had to transfer the money quickly so we could go to the sea. When I got outside via another door, Walid found me. He started to hit me with a water hose until my back was completely open. When I asked him what I had done wrong, he grabbed a gun and said, I’m going to shoot you dead while he was holding the gun to my head.

Stephanie: 05:25  Before we continue to discuss the trial, we should note that this is not the first time we’ve talked about it. In early 2023 we did a justice update on the extradition of Walid from Ethiopia, where he had been sentenced to 18 years for smuggling to the Netherlands.

Janet: 05:40  Yeah, that was an extradition, few years ago, October 2022, and what got our attention at that time was the kind of cooperation that happens behind the scenes that made this extradition possible, and this is through a thing called a joint team. People keep on describing it as an investigative team, but I’m being quite kind of absolutist about this, that I believe it is only called a joint team, despite the fact that it includes people who do investigations, but that’s what they call themselves, and they look into crimes against migrants in Libya. We kind of head back to 2022, that’s when the International Criminal Court joined this team, and that’s why we’re really interested in it, because it seems interesting that the ICC is sharing information with a range of other countries. That’s also the Netherlands and the UK, Italy, Spain and I just spotted that Germany has now joined as well, and it’s run really out of Europol, which is a bit different from the joint investigative teams, which are actually prosecutors from around the world. This is police kinds of organizations, and it’s involved, I think, really interestingly, in a way that the ICCs material is being shared to support, to enable, to I mean, I’m really not too sure exactly how to describe it, these domestic investigations and then these domestic actual cases, like the one that we’re discussing in The Netherlands.

Mirjiam van Reisen

Stephanie: 07:20  We’ll get back to that joint team. I am dying to call it a Joint Investigative Team, but Janet won’t let me, and the ICC and the focus of their investigation later, but first we wanted to discuss the trial a little further, so we chatted to Mirjiam van Reisen. She’s a human trafficking expert and a professor at Tilburg University, and also at the Leiden University Medical Center. She has edited a book called ‘Enslaved: Trapped and Trafficked in Digital Black Holes: Human Trafficking Trajectories to Libya’, which focuses on the journey of Eritrean refugees. Hi Mirjiam. 

Mirjiam van Reisen: Hi Stephanie, 

Stephanie: You followed a lot of the days of the sittings of the trial in Zwolle. What struck you?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 08:03  Well, what struck me, first of all, was that Walid, really, absolutely wasn’t able to reveal anything about the situation and about the case, which I think was difficult for the victims who recognized him even there in the court. And I was also struck by the fact that the defense, although the defense, put up a very fierce defense for Walid. Spoke of the traffickers in Libya as those that owned the refugees, which I thought was remarkable and obviously speaks to the title of our book, which is called Enslaved. So I was very struck by the fact that they used a similar description to describe the situation. Even though defending that Walid was not responsible, necessarily, for what was alleged.

Stephanie: 09:12  So Mirjiam, what you’re referring to is that in court, the defense made the argument that there is another suspected trafficker that the Netherlands will likely have extradited, but that is Kidane that we will go into more detail with later. And part of the argument of the defense was those victims who were abused were not quote unquote Walid’s people, but they were actually, quote unquote owned by Kidane, and therefore Walid should not be responsible for their mistreatment.

Janet: 09:42  What I was wondering, Mirjiam is, did you feel that you learnt something specifically new out of the details of this trial law because Walid wasn’t saying anything himself, was it really just repeating the kind of things that you know already?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 09:58  So in relation to the way in which the information was presented, in the case, it did confirm a lot of detail from our research, and even detail which you know, I mean, for me, I could also not be sure whether the locations, the amounts, the modus operandi, the way of torturing, etc, were going to be similar, because what I know is that the persons that we interviewed, the survivors that we interviewed for our research, are completely different than the witnesses in the court. So it was very striking that even to minute detail, it was completely comparable. There were interesting elements that came up that I wouldn’t necessarily have known. So, for instance, one of the witnesses here that was quoted in the case was referring to the threat that Walid, as trafficker, as in charge of these many people, was making to them, referring to Sawa. And Sawa is significant, because Sawa is the location where all of the Eritreans are basically taken to for their first training in military service that is then indefinite and from which many try to flee. And the conditions as we know it in Sawa, in Eritrea, are very similar to the conditions in Libya, and there is very similar threats of incarceration, of torture and of sexual violence, sexual violence in the sense of women being required to serve the leaders, and the conditions are very similar. So it was very interesting for me to hear that Walid was systematically referring to having been trained in Sawa as a threat to the survivors, to make them understand where they were coming from in terms of being serious about what they were intending to do. 

Stephanie: 12:19  Is that also a connection of sorts, between the Asmara authorities and these trafficking networks. In your research, has that come up that there, that there might be such a connection?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 12:30  Well, what was also very interesting was the way in which the prosecution was making the charge and the case where they would explain the route as starting from Eritrea over the central Mediterranean route. They refer to that as CMR, through Sudan Libya into Italy and then onwards to the Netherlands. That was consistently the way in which they presented the case and which they repeated again and again in the réquisitoire, and that indicates to me that they are taking it very seriously, that the leadership of this human trafficking criminal organization are all Eritreans, and that the victims are all, almost all, Eritreans, and that those that are referred to as the capos, the ones that are assisting in the trafficking network, are Eritreans. And that those are that collecting the money, the agents that are collecting the money in the Netherlands and elsewhere are Eritreans and that people originate from Eritrea. So they didn’t speak directly to the organization over and above Walid and others, such as the one who is still to be tried, Kidane, but they were certainly creating a context. The defense, on the other hand, was leading the responsibility to Lybia, especially the Diab brothers, the three brothers. And so that is a very important difference in hypothesis over the organization that instructs or that protects the level of traffickers at the level of Walid and Kidane, because obviously what is clear is that a network of that size cannot operate without further protection. I think that should be clear, and so in my view, it is nonsensical to put that responsibility solely in Libya, because Libya is not the only location. So we see the same protection in Sudan. We say, see the same protection Ethiopia in Eritrea, and we also see how the Eritrean long arm is involved in the organization of human trafficking and the collection of the money here in the Netherlands and in Europe. So to me, it is only logical that the conclusion of this organization is going to go into the direction of the organization from Eritrea, in which the Diab brothers play a role in the context of Libya and others do so in the context of Sudan or Ethiopia or elsewhere

Janet: 15:33  In terms of that kind of bigger system and money, particularly on the first day the judges threw out charges relating to money laundering and this term ‘Hawala’, which is this traditional system of payment. The defense had argued that Hawala hadn’t been included in the original extradition request, and the judges accepted that perhaps you could explain to us a bit more about this system, this money system, and and how it works, and tell us, do you think it’s it’s going to cause a problem that the court isn’t going to look into it itself? I mean, is this leaving a very important piece of the bigger picture out?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 16:18  No, I don’t think so, because this was only thrown out in the sense of it being a charge specifically, this was only thrown out because it wasn’t in the extradition agreement with Ethiopia. However, the prosecution argued that that doesn’t mean that that activity is not a distinct activity that is connected to the whole modus operandi of the human trafficking perpetrated under Walid. So they would still argue that it is one of the elements of the criminal activity that this organization is perpetrating. So that’s just a small legal difference, but in the sense that it is taken on board of the charges that remained, because the activity itself is an activity that fits under the Criminal pattern. Of course, Kidane has already been convicted in the Emirates of money laundering, so I think there’s little doubt that this is part of how the money was collected and extorted to allow the release of survivors. Or, yeah, people help Libya.

Zekarias Habtemariam Kidane

Stephanie: 17:36  We should mention Kidane and what he is. So this is my moment to shine as Stephapedia.

Janet: Yes, we love the Stephapedia. Go on. Steph.

Janet: 17:45  The Netherlands has also asked for another smuggler to be extradited from the United Arab Emirates. And this is Zekarias Habtemariam Kidane. He is now in the United Arab Emirates on money laundering charges, as Mirjiam has just said, via an arrest in Sudan in 2023 the Dutch prosecutors are confident that he will be extradited soon, but we don’t have any date. And the idea was that he would be able to go on trial together with Walid, but that didn’t happen. Now, Kidane is a major player. He was sentenced in absentia to life in prison by an Ethiopian court in June 2021 after being convicted of starving and torturing African refugees and migrants who were headed for Europe in warehouses in Libya. So essentially the same things that Walid is now on trial for, but he has escaped from the court premises in Addis Ababa in February 2021 after nearly a year on trial on eight counts of human trafficking. Now in 2021 the Dutch public prosecutors put him on the list of most wanted people, and then he got arrested in Sudan and the Netherlands sought his extradition from the United Arab Emirates. There was a lot of organization, and they had to have an agreement set up for extradition, which those things have all happened, and now the idea is he’s going to come here and they’re going to try him again. But we know that the network that Walid and Kidane were part of didn’t stop operating when they were arrested. So how is the reality of traffic from the Horn of Africa through Libya now? And have there been any developments in how it operates, given that these people are touted as the kind of heads of this massive operation, and they’re both behind bars in different places?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 19:39  Well, that’s a really good question. I would say that even prior to that question, how is that situation now, we could also ask the question, how was it prior to them being these bosses of these premises where and the routes where these survivors or these, these people trafficked were under their control? because both Walid and Kidane came up as more junior members, other, some other traffickers that should, that have actually been put under sanctions from the UN Security Council and who still have to be arrested. But that speaks absolutely to the point that there is organization over and above Walid and Kidane, which doesn’t mean, and is not undermining the point that Walid and Kidane were each in charge over route and locations at a particular time, and that is why they are in court. But prior to that, they were working under other people, and they came up bigger and bigger under their protection, and equally, now others have taken over these routes. The routes have also changed because there has been the war in Sudan. So the whole route through Sudan has become very difficult. The situation in Libya is extremely difficult. And there has also been war in Ethiopia. So we have seen that the roots have been going, starting to go more southwards, from Addis Ababa through South Sudan, or directly into Kenya and then Uganda, etc, etc. So many, many more people are in similar conditions as they previously were in Libya, but now on this southern route. And again, these routes are controlled by Eritreans.

Stephanie: 21:31  You said before that even though Kidane and Walid are not running these routes anymore, they’re still ongoing. So the trials are not enough to halt the trafficking. What more can be done do you think? or is there anything else that you can do?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 21:49  Yeah, I mean, I think maybe my problem is with the framing of the question in the sense that this is a really large criminal network that started operating well at the beginning of this century. So the way in which I would like to see it was that there was total impunity before. To put these cases together really takes a long time. I mean, the investigation took a very long time. It’s very complicated. I know also from our work, we also took years before. Then finally, we were able to write that book. You can’t go into the locations. It’s really complex, and people are scared. People are scared to come forward, etc, etc. So I think that the investigative team did a really incredible job to get so many witnesses. And so I’m really going full out here to say that you know to fight impunity is difficult, and they did a really good job. Things have also gone wrong. The trafficker from the same network that was arrested in Italy and taken to court in Italy – In the end, there was a problem with his identity. So that only, we only learned from that how important it was to have solidity in these cases. So going fast and not having solidity is definitely not the way to go. So there needs to be a lot of solidity to build these cases. What we can say at present is that there is a lot of knowledge. This started from not knowing anything about such an operation, etc, etc, to really having now very in depth understanding and also collaboration and networks. 

Of course, it’s a huge network. It’s a huge criminal network, so that it will take time to proceed with that, but I would say that certainly we have seen responses as a result of these court cases. I mean, in the in the past, I mean, these guys were not scared of doing anything, and they saw that in the court case, didn’t we? I mean, you, you saw the references to whatever, what was put on Facebook, on WhatsApp, whatever, nobody, nobody was scared of anything, that, for sure, has absolutely changed. 

And so in that sense, I think that what is important now is that through this case against Walid, that this is a crime of the highest order. I think that has become very clear, whatever, whatever the court will decide. I think that is very clear. It’s also very clear that prosecutors take this seriously and are able to investigate this and to bring this to court. It’s also clear that they are changing the laws and the regulations to be able to prosecute this. What is also needed is an understanding about the way in which the European policy, the policy of the West in general, in relation to the broader migration problem, can be playing into these criminal networks, and that is a debate that we haven’t had. Although, speaking about what was surprising, it was definitely significant that the prosecutor in a closing statement mentioned that the way in which we assume that when we close borders, we solve the problem, might be mistaken. She was saying, when we close the borders, we play directly in the hands of these criminal human trafficking networks. So to answer your question, I think there are real consequences, and I think they are being felt. Does it change the way in which they operate? Yes, it does, but we also have more power to investigate it. But generally it has become a point of reflection on what is happening here and where responsibilities lie, and how we also need to take responsibility of this situation.

Victims and the Trial 

Stephanie: 26:05  One of the things I noticed in this court case is that the victims were, even the ones who spoke in court, were extremely scared of any retaliation, and you’ve worked extensively on Eritrea. Was it particular for this trial that they were this worried, or is this something that you see a lot in these cases? 

Mirjiam van Reisen: 26:27  No. I mean, the, what we call the Eritrean long arm, or the transnational repression from Eritrea, is really, really extensive and serious, and so that, again, raises at least the question of the involvement of the regime, because you certainly can, can ask the question. I mean, Walid came here. He didn’t know anybody here in the Netherlands. I mean, he was extradited from from Ethiopia. How from prison can he open up a network to pressurize victims to change their witness statements? How on earth is that possible? And that ties in with what we consistently see, and that is the silencing of people, Eritreans, who speak against the Eritrean government. So in my understanding, the way in which people are being silenced are part of the same system, and the Eritreans know that, and they know the consequences of it, so the fear is real.

The Eritrean Government and the Trial

Stephanie: 27:37  So what does then the Eritrean government get out of letting these people migrate to Europe. Is it remittances? Is that why?

Mirjiam van Reisen: 27:46  Everything – It’s money. I mean, it is, well, it’s two things, actually. The first thing is that President Isaias, the president of Eritrea, has always consistently been scared of the youth, so when he took the power in 2001 the first thing that he did was take all of the students from Asmara University and put them in prison for months, and from there, he started to put them in the military camp Sawa, where he keeps them under control, and push also a good number out, because if there’s too much youth, there is a fear that he might not be able to control the situation in Eritrea. And then they put one and one together. So if they were pushing them out, they might as well make money of this. And so the remittances was always already there, the 2% tax, etc, all the other so called voluntary contributions. And then on top of that, this became a very lucrative business model. It is possible that it kind of emerged by some sort of accident. It might also be by design, we don’t know, but what we do know is when Eritrea was smuggling weapons to Hamas, that Israel in Sudan was bombing these transports, and so then they started to put people on top of the trucks to hide the weapons, and then they drop them in Jaffa just before entering into Gaza. And so that is where the first wave of human trafficking for ransom then starts with very low amounts at that time. Basically it seems like to trade off against what has already been paid for these people and then and then these amounts, they become bigger and bigger, also because probably many of the costs for transportation and the protection in Egypt and Sudan, etc, increases so the ransom amounts increase. But what happened was that a very lucrative business model was born, and so the Eritreans that were very, very interested in money, they were under sanctions. So they live off the diaspora. They just found another criminal activity that could sustain the country.

Singularities in the Walid Trial ?

Janet: 30:19  How singular is this specific case, this specific trial against Walid and then potentially the one against Kidane? I mean, are there other trials in other EU countries? Is there a comparison that you, you could make for us? 

Mirjiam van Reisen: 30:35  Yeah, I mean, prior to this case, there was the case against John. He was also convicted. He was a Dutch national, but an Eritrean trafficker. And this investigative team that is still ongoing is certainly having its eyes on more at the same level of Walid and Kidane and over and above them. So which is good, it’s important.

Janet: 31:02  Where should we be looking next? Do you think Mirjiam? 

Mirjiam van Reisen: 31:06  Well, I don’t know. I mean, this investigative team has really very much increased. It started just with the Netherlands, the UK and Italy. Now there’s so many more countries in that team. There’s the ICC. So who knows. What we can be clear of is that, I mean, I don’t think that it, that it will stop here with Kidane. I don’t think that. 

Janet: 31:27  Mirjiam, such a delight to meet you, even though at a distance and really interesting to hear all the details from you. I don’t promise to read your book tomorrow, but I am definitely going to try and find it and find out more about this, because it’s a fascinating area that you’re working on. Thank you.

Mirjiam van Reisen: 31:45  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

The Involvement of the International Criminal Court

Janet: 31:48  Great to hear directly from Mirjiam about the bigger picture there. But let’s get back to what we often like to focus on, which is the International Criminal Court and their involvement, how they’re working on the same crimes against migrants as the Dutch have been.

Stephanie: 32:06  So to start with, the ICC has been involved with looking at Libya for 15 years here, 

Janet: 15 years !

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s not the longest one. I mean, you know, all the Afghans NGOs are now saying it was also what’s the longest, but it is a very, very, very long case. We had a civil war, we had a UN referral, and we had several suspects, nobody in court. But then…

Janet: 32:30  Then, particularly since we’ve had a change in the office of the prosecutor, they’ve brought in a change of investigative focus, I would say. We were conscious when we were looking at this back three years ago, that the NGO community had started to collect a huge amount of material and were really pushing a different way of analyzing the situation, to say what is happening against migrants is also connected to the results of this civil war that the ICC was originally investigating. So now the ICC is able to go to the Security Council, as it has done this week, and say …

Deputy ICC Prosecutor Nazat Shameem Khan: 33:14  ‘Through our collective work, there is a new momentum towards justice in Libya’

Stephanie: 33:20  That was deputy prosecutor Nazat Shameem Khan speaking in New York in the week that we recorded the pod. Her tone was really upbeat, and she lauded the arrest of Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri by German authorities in July. She doesn’t laud his transfer yet because it hadn’t happened when she was making the speech, but since then, in the middle of the ASP, he was brought to the ICC detention center in The Hague, and he has since had his initial appearance.

Janet: 33:47  Yeah, it’s interesting this change of tone, because, I mean, you Steph, like I have been watching the ICC prosecutor and now the deputy prosecutor report back to the Security Council saying, Woe is me, Woe is me. No cooperation, no this. And this was so completely different because of this arrest, because they’re able to say that potentially, in 2026, we’ve got a trial. But Steph, there’s also a but here.

Stephanie: 34:15  There is a big but, that is, that we have an entire saga on an arrest in Italy with another Libyan suspect Osama Almasri Najim, but Italy let him go. He got sent back to Tripoli. He is a suspect for crimes committed in a place called Mitiga prison, also for murder, torture, rape and sexual violence. But, apparently there are reports that he was arrested in Libya.

Janet: 34:43  Yeah, beyond what the prosecutor said to the Security Council, they also put in a report which, Steph, you did a very quick scour of with me an hour before recording and we checked exactly what they had to say. So this is quoting from their report, ‘the office’, meaning ‘the office of the prosecutor, has to date, received no direct information from the Libyan Attorney General related to reports that Osama Najim has been arrested in Tripoli’. We did do an episode about this, about you know exactly what has gone backwards and forwards, but they do welcome the recent measures taken by the Libyan Government to remove Osama Najim from his official duties within the Judicial Police in Tripoli so, so far so unclear. 

Stephanie: 35:32  Yeah, Deputy Prosecutor Khan also made specific reference to the joint team, the five state parties that she said had contributed also to the ICC investigations.

Deputy ICC Prosecutor Nazat Shameem Khan: 35:43 ‘We can clearly see in our activities, an increased alignment of cause across actors, from Libyan national authorities to civil society partners and to our colleagues from other states that wish to support accountability for international crimes.’

Luigi Prosperi on ICC Cooperation

Janet: 36:00  So this is the bigger context that we’re sketching. And to help close the circle of all these different elements that we’re pulling together in this, you know, really interesting set of stuff, ICC and the Netherlands and Italy and Libya and Eritrea, our producer Margherita, who is also covering the Walid trial directly in her journalistic hat. She caught up with Luigi Prosperi from Utrecht University, and she asked him exactly what this trial can actually mean for the ICC and for the future of ICC and state cooperation.

Luigi Prosperi: 36:40  I think that the most important contribution of these cases, and this one about Walid in particular, is that now you see maybe the first effective translation into life, like putting into life, this idea of the ICC as a justice hub. That was also, I think, in the policy on cooperation and complementarity that was issued by the ICC office of the prosecutor in 2024. And the idea is that the ICC can collect information, but can also cooperate with countries, with states parties that are able and willing to prosecute the cases. They could use investigation tools. They could use joint teams under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, as they did in this case, they can set up a joint investigation team between EU member states, where the ICC wouldn’t be involved, but states can then follow up on these, – how could I say – an instigation of the ICC, the ICC reaching out and trying to find partners. So then you have all these partnerships that can be also flexible, that you can use to achieve the goal. And the goal is fighting impunity for core international crimes, although sometimes you cannot then label the offenses, the crimes as core international crimes, as it happened in the Walid case. But at least you will try to give justice to victims, to offer them the opportunity to tell their stories in a courtroom, in the context of a trial. And then you also have these competition between states where they can actually express the will to the ICC, and particularly to the office of the prosecutor, to prosecute the crimes. It’s also good in terms of reputation for states, so sometimes they are eager to contribute. And it’s a way also to manage the limited resources that the ICC has at the moment. So this is also a way to overcome a very practical issue that they had.

Stephanie: 38:46  Over the years. We’ve heard the counter argument, which basically points at when states prosecute these traffickers, usually they go for crimes that are lower level or not as serious as the ones that you could prosecute under international crimes that the ICC could do. So Margherita put that to Luigi as well.

Luigi Prosperi: 39:05  I share the concern in general terms, but in practice, I will start from the idea that complementarity actually doesn’t entail that when it states that prosecute the crimes falling under the jurisdiction of the ICC, they have an obligation to use the same label so to qualify the offenses as core international crimes, the standard that was agreed upon by the judges of the ICC is same persons and substantially the same conducts, not same label, not same charges. So it’s to some extent acceptable that states use, maybe also in a smarter way, the criminal codes and the legislation that they have. For instance, in this case, as you know, the Dutch Prosecution Service requested 20 years of imprisonment as the penalty. So it’s a quite serious offense anyways, and it’s a very heavy penalty. We get to almost the same result as before the ICC. This is also good, I think, in terms of the gravity threshold that the ICC has. So as we know, as everybody knows, the ICC should only focus on the most responsible, the people most responsible for the commission of the crimes. Therefore, it should be states stepping in and taking care of, let’s say, small fries, like people that are not really the leaders in an organization. And in that sense, I think this is also a very good example of how states could step in, could fill the gap and take care of leaders of smaller organizations, or people that are not necessarily leaders of organizations suspected of having committed the crimes. So that could also work pretty well, and it’s a way, again, to sort of encourage states to fight impunity, effectively, concretely in specific cases. Having all these forums.

Janet: 41:13  As always, when we’re wrapping up these podcasts Steph, I feel like we’ve been running a marathon, because quite often we bite off an awful lot. We start off with this particular trial, but in order to understand this trial, we end up discussing how everything works in Eritrea. We also want to understand why these trials are difficult to do, how much work it takes. But we also are trying to understand how they work together with other trials, like the ones at the ICC. So I feel like we’re just trying to stuff a lot in, always.

Stephanie: 41:46  Yeah, I think now this part of our podcast is just, we just pull on the threads that we find interesting, and then lots of other stuff comes tumbling out. And we are usually left with like, oh, we should do another podcast on this, because Mirjiam and the explanation of why Eritrea is sending young men away and how then they profit from these migrant routes. I think that’s also very interesting, because we always have this idea that it’s extremely simple, and migration is simple, and crimes are kind of black and white, and it never is, and it’s always very nuanced. Our listeners will know that it’s never quite how we think it is, but that’s the fun part, also, of doing the podcast and having these wonderful experts that put their time and effort into talking to us and explaining to us, knuckleheads of journalists who just want the basic things to explain that it’s much more complicated than we can put in a 300 word story.

Janet: 42:44  So if you’ve stuck with us through to the end of this marathon podcast with all these different elements, thank you. And, as Steph says, promise that we’ll do another one on the same stuff or different stuff and different threads again next time.

Stephanie: 42:56  We’re going to pull on some of our other threads. Thank you guys so much for listening. Bye.

[MUSIC]

Janet: 43:00 Just to say that if you are enjoying this podcast and you’d like to give us a bit of extra support, you can head over to our Support Us page where you can give us a tip, or you can follow us on Patreon, and you can download our newsletter. And we really appreciate everybody who gives us a bit of extra support there.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg. This episode was created in partnership with Justiceinfo.net,  an independent site covering justice efforts for mass violence, and with the Hague Humanity Hub. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.