In October 2022, the now 37-year-old Eritrean national, Ghebremedin Temeschen Ghebru, was arrested by Interpol at Addis Ababa International Airport, as he was boarding a flight to Australia. He was extradited to Italy under charges of being a member of a criminal organisation smuggling migrants. He was accused of being a “hawaladar”. The hawala is an informal and untracked money transfer system through which, in this case, payments made by the relatives of those kidnapped are sent to traffickers and then to their various intermediaries along the journey to Europe.
This case and the one of another alleged trafficker from Eritrea, known as Welid, extradited to the Netherlands, just a week before Ghebru, were achieved through a joint international cooperation team, set up in 2018, involving judicial and police authorities in Italy and the Netherlands, together with the United Kingdom, Spain, Europol, and since 2022, the International Criminal Court (ICC). They focus on tackling trafficking and crimes against migrants in Libya.
The trial for Ghebru started in 2023 and is before the Court of Assize in Catania, where the first victims of his alleged organised network were disembarked. The defendant was released from prison after the first re-examination, which found no grounds for the crime of participating in a criminal association, organization or group, on which the precautionary measure was based. So Ghebru returned to Australia, where he lives and works, says his defence lawyer Michele Calantropo to Justice Info.
Over the last two years, the court has heard two prosecution witnesses. The defendant was scheduled to appear on March 3 but the hearing was postponed because Ghebru could not get a visa. The defence plans to bring around 10 witnesses. Calantropo believes the trial will end in 2025. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment.
“He is not guilty of all crimes,” stated Calantropo. In 2017, at the time of the phone tapping on which the case is based, the defendant stayed in Dubai for four months, where he “worked as the consultant and accountant for an import-export company, talking to customers and suppliers about supply payments, there is not a single contact with the traffickers,” the lawyer says. Calantropo adds that he filed all the documentation from the Dubai Chamber of Commerce on the company Ghebru worked for and many of his witnesses will also testify about it.
A strand of cases: the “Glauco” operations
This ongoing trial is just the latest one in a much longer operation, known as “Glauco”. It all started with the 2013 tragic shipwreck in which 300 migrants died off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. The resulting criminal investigation led to the conviction of six smugglers and the issuing of European and international arrest warrants for other members of the criminal network that operated in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, and many European countries. Run by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate team of the public prosecutor’s office in Palermo, this operation led to three more sets of arrests in the following years. The latest one was the “Glauco 4” operation in 2020, where another dozen people were apprehended across several cities in Italy.
The men arrested were accused of migrant trafficking and smuggling from African countries to Libyan detention facilities and then towards Italy and their final destination. Migrants rarely want to stay in Italy and hope to get to northern European countries, like Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The men were suspected of managing money transfers reaching accounts in Dubai as part of the hawala systems, through methods like Postepay, Moneygram and Western Union.
In the official documents, Ghebru is also mentioned as part of, and suspected to be leading, the same international network, but at the time of the arrests, he was still at large. The public prosecutor working on this investigation confirmed the events in a previous interview with Justice Info, but preferred not to comment at this stage, as he and other members of the Palermo Anti-Mafia team have been placed under police protection since last autumn: they received thousands of threats for charging the current deputy Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Salvini, with kidnapping and dereliction of duty for his refusal to let a migrant rescue boat from the NGO Open Arms with 147 people on board dock in Italy in 2019. Salvini, who served as Italy’s Interior minister at the time of the incident, was acquitted in December 2024.
In its early stage, the trial of those arrested during the “Glauco” operation seemed to set a blueprint for Ghebru’s one. The first re-examination found no grounds for the crime of association with a criminal organization, and most of the men could be released while the proceedings carried on at the Court of Assize in Catania. Of the group of 14 arrested, as announced by Italian media at the time, two were dealt with separately. They opted for an abbreviated trial, a procedure where there is no presentation of evidence, but the judge studies the case and delivers a quicker and reduced sentence.
The remaining 12 included ten Eritreans, one Ethiopian and one Sudanese national. On 5 December 2023, the judges found seven men guilty in the first instance judgment and acquitted the other three. The sentences were reduced heavily from the several years initially requested by the prosecution to a range from 10 to 18 months. According to the verdict, three of them were convicted only for the crimes connected to the hawala, two for financial crimes and smuggling, and another two for smuggling. The defence lawyers appealed and the appeal verdict is expected on 6 March 2025. There are no victims in the case.
Giuseppina Massaiu works in the defence of three of the men and says to Justice Info that her clients are not guilty and they have always rejected the count of migrant smuggling: “They consider it to be defamatory,” she adds. According to her, the prosecution did not consider the fact that any help, entering Italy or transferring money, can be given out of solidarity, “solidarity towards a relative, an acquaintance, someone from your same region”. “This social duty is culturally very present in their community. For example, there are cases of migrants who arrive in Italy with no documents or money and need to receive transfers from their families. And in the case of migrants kidnapped and held by Libyan traffickers, family members pay because otherwise, their relatives would remain in Libyan detention centres indefinitely.” The investigation that led to the “Glauco 4” arrests and later to the extradition of Ghebru was based on phone tapping, which both defence lawyers have contested. “This way the charges remain quite superficial,” claims Massaiu.
Prosecuting “small fish”?
In the last decade, Italy has seen few trials for crimes such as human trafficking against migrants, kidnapping, violence and extortion in Libyan prisons. The most notorious one is the 2017 verdict for Osman Matammud, a Somali national found guilty of kidnapping for the purpose of extortion, killings, and sexual violence when managing “transit camps” in Libya. But the vast majority of the people put on trial are accused of migrant smuggling.
"As a tendency, the more important traffickers are not targeted, and this leads to the authorities going after the smaller ones because there is a practical issue in conducting investigations in other countries,” says Stefano Zirulia, professor of criminal law at the University of Milan. “In order to show the public that they are doing something, and as a consequence of mainly focusing on the Italian territory and waters, the authorities apply Italian laws, which are very strict and can be applied even to these individuals who have done little to nothing” Zirulia explains that while there is a separate crime of human trafficking, which is more complex and requires the purpose of exploitation, in Italy smuggling is codified in article 12 of the Consolidated Immigration Act, which “only requires committing acts aimed at facilitating the entry of a foreigner without documents”.
Following the European Union 2002 Facilitators Package, done in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, explains Zirulia, all European countries had to “criminalise any form of assistance in irregular entry”. Since then, Italy has seen government after government raising sentences to give the impression of tackling the traffickers, and this has led the country to have some of the harshest sentences for smuggling, says Zirulia, which can go over 20 years. According to Zirulia, “criminalising smuggling across the board, the way it is done, risks endangering the fundamental rights of migrants: the right to life when they are in danger and need to be rescued, and the right to request asylum”.
A broad range of acts can fall under this law. “Everything happening in Libya can also be part of this definition, and on the other hand, those who are themselves victims of smuggling, also fall under these acts. Sometimes they are the migrants who steer the boat in the final stretch because, simply, they were placed there and there is no one else who knows how to do it, or they use a GPS,” says Maria Crippa, a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Law “Cesare Beccaria” at the University of Milan. The usual procedure, explains Crippa, is for the police to collect statements from migrants as they disembark and ask them who brought them there. “It is not always easy to understand if the people they point to are affiliated with an organisation or if they are victims too.”
According to a report compiled by the collective Arci Porco Rosso, in 2024, 106 migrants were arrested for smuggling, one for every 600 people arriving. The majority were arrested right after disembarking. Several NGOs rescuing migrants at sea have also been accused of smuggling over the years.
“In Italy, we don’t have discretion, if the prosecutor has the information, he must take legal action. But in practice, there is a choice of which charges to press,” says Crippa, adding that the vast majority of cases are brought for migrant smuggling and for the crime of participating in a criminal association. These principles make it easier for the authorities to apply Italian laws to conducts committed abroad, and in case of a guilty verdict, they can also show the broader dimension of the crime.
However, this strategy of applying the article on smuggling “has consequences for who is charged, so the small fish or the victims themselves, and for what they are charged with,” says Crippa. “Therefore, convictions are, in the majority of cases, for aiding and abetting, and the whole aspect related to trafficking and crimes against the person is lost.” While human trafficking is a crime against the person, smuggling is legally considered a crime against the country’s border integrity, explains Crippa.
For Stella Arena, a lawyer for the Italian Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration, with this law, “the criminal trial has become a way of controlling the flow of migration”.
No cooperation with Libya
In Italy, there has been no conviction against Libyan nationals for crimes against migrants yet. “There is a problem of accountability for those at the top of the system, who are typically Libyan,” says Crippa. She adds that the problem is that Italian authorities cannot physically go to Tripoli to catch these people, their only way would be to issue an international arrest warrant and rely on the Libyans to do the rest. “As long as there is this political situation in Libya, it’s clear that an agreement, even just to gather evidence, is not possible. So, imagine asking for extradition.” One possibility could be to arrest a suspect in a third country that would extradite them, but there is no public information on whether Italy has international arrest warrants against Libyans.
The debate over crimes against migrants in the country heated up after Osama Najim, an alleged war criminal from Libya wanted by the ICC, was arrested by Italian police on 19 January 2025, only to be released and sent back to Tripoli two days later by the government, in contravention to its duty to cooperate with The Hague-based Court. His arrest and release has also sparked debate about the close ties between Rome and Tripoli. “We saw it with the Najim case, there is no real will to act to stop the exploitation networks of migration,” says Zirulia. According him, the migrant trafficking networks, unlike the mafia vertical organisation, are mostly organised horizontally and they can be closely connected to state apparatuses. “So, it is very difficult to think about how to dismantle the leadership. Maybe that’s the wrong question, but we certainly need to ask what we can do to target individuals who have decision-making powers.”
Adding to the lack of political will and the difficult cooperation with Libya is yet another obstacle: the old gap in Italy’s jurisdiction on international crimes. Rome has still not incorporated the full range of war crimes and crimes against humanity into its criminal code and cannot exercise universal jurisdiction. As a result, “it loses all that aspect of crimes against humanity, so the interrelation regarding the use of migrants as an economic resource by the militias, as commodities for exchange, as a resource to maintain military power, is no longer considered,” Crippa says.
Omer Shatz, legal director of Front-Lex, a legal NGO, says that accountability for crimes against migrants should not include only Libyan traffickers and authorities. For decades, the governments in Rome have signed agreements with their counterparts in Tripoli, which include the Libyan control of the migration flows. Shatz argues that Italian and European authorities, including the EU border agency Frontex, are also responsible for the increasingly common interception of migrant boats by Libyan or Tunisian guards, and so, for “feeding the business of rape, torture, extortion and the ransom that families are paying” to free their loved ones from detention centres in Libya.
The international lawyer is critical of the fact that the ICC joined the joint team in 2022, seemingly leaving the prosecutions of these crimes to the same national authorities, including the Italian ones, who do not have the means to go higher up in the decision-making chain. While the ICC has included crimes against migrants in its Libya investigation, Shatz thinks that Italian and European authorities should be also investigated as coperpetrators. “They are the most responsible actors, they are the ones for which the ICC was established to begin with.”
