The ICC may be the only institution capable of breaking the current impasse by threatening to bring Europe’s leaders to criminal account. This is the work of last resort for which international criminal law is designed. The ICC should embrace the progressive ideals that drove its construction, and engage.

Non-refoulement is the central principle of international refugee law, which stipulates that nobody can be returned to their country of origin or any country where they have a well-founded fear of torture or persecution. As a compromise, the GCM does not explicitly include the words ‘non-refoulement’ but it does stipulate in Objective 21 ‘the prohibition of collective expulsion and of returning migrants when there is a real and foreseeable risk of death and torture’.

Nearly three million people in Sudan are at risk of human trafficking and illegal immigrations. Foreign refugees, especially from South Sudan and Eritrea, account for 900,000 of the immigrants, while the number of Sudanese internally displaced because of security and civil unrest is estimated at 2.2 million. Sudan ranks second among the countries hosting foreign refugees.

Like the hotspots before them, the new “controlled centres” leave the Dublin asylum rules untouched. But there is a key lesson to be learnt: the new centres will need to guarantee access to adequate asylum procedures, unlike the hotspots. As the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, emphasised in a statement about the proposals, people will also need to be housed in dignifying living conditions.

This migration is the result of constructed economic dependence, new labour migration, exploitation, and colonial and post-colonial domination.

The demonstrations broke out in late January 2018, following the government’s announcement of the new budget in December 2017. The demonstrations did not pose a serious threat to the regime, but they sent a clear message that the Sudanese people’s patience with the economic crisis has ended.

An Amnesty International report accused European governments of being ‘knowingly complicit in the torture and abuse of tens of thousands of refugees and migrants detained by Libyan immigration authorities in appalling conditions’. However, In the wake of the revelations of the Libyan slave trade, EU officials announced plans to team up with the African Union in a joint task force of police and intelligence agencies targeting human trafficking.

As a result of these measures, sub-Saharan migrants and refugees trying to cross North Africa have been forced to stay in Algeria, a trend that has fuelled anti-migrant sentiment and xenophobia among Algerians. In the spring of 2017, the controversial online campaign ‘No to Africans in Algeria’, which framed sub-Saharan migrants as a threat, went viral and heralded a significant political shift to the right.