On 4 December, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report entitled ‘Libya: ICC Reignites Hope for Long-Delayed Justice’. The report centres on the reignited hope that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will act to bring forward ‘justice for victims of [the al-Kaniyat militia] that controlled [Tarhouna] during the 2019-2020 battle for Tripoli’. HRW writes that from 2019-2020, al-Kaniyat and their affiliates ‘detained, tortured, disappeared, and executed people in at least four detention facilities while they controlled the town of Tarhouna’, with no one brought to trial for these abuses to date. They also note that at this time al-Kaniyat was sided with the Libyan National Army (LNA) under Khalifa Haftar’s command. HRW details abuses and crimes uncovered by fieldwork and interviews with victims, which HRW attributes to al-Kaniyat. At the end of the report, HRW provides some of the interview accounts detailing these abuses. One of HRW’s interviews was with an individual named Sameer, who detailed without reason in ‘Boxes Prison’ after trying to leave Tarhouna for Tripoli in 2016, where he was denied fundamental hygiene needs, beaten, and regularly heard gunshots.
The report also documents ongoing legal proceedings to hold al-Kaniyat responsible, such as the United States sanctioning al-Kaniyat in November 2020 under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act for the ‘killing of civilians, torture, forced disappearances, and displacement of civilians’. HRW also writes that an ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, conducted an official mission to Libya in November 2022, visiting prisons and mass graves in Tarhouna and meeting with the families of victims whose abuse is attributed to al-Kaniyat. HRW reports that an ICC case will be more likely to bring justice due to judicial coercion in Libya.
Read the full report here.