ICMPD features IAMROC and the work of the Joint Team on combatting migrant smuggling

ICMPD has published an In Focus feature on the Joint Team and the IAMROC project, looking at the investigation and prosecution work behind a major migrant smuggling conviction in the Netherlands earlier this year.

CILC welcomes ICMPD’s feature on the Joint Team and the IAMROC project, and the case that stands behind it.

In January 2026, a Dutch court handed down a twenty-year sentence in a large-scale migrant smuggling case connected to the Joint Team’s work, while a co-accused was extradited from the United Arab Emirates to face charges in the Netherlands. The feature sets out what a result of this kind requires: years of investigation across multiple jurisdictions, sustained cooperation between prosecutors and law enforcement inside and outside the EU, and a clear-eyed focus on the cases that can realistically be brought to court.

The article gives particular attention to how the Joint Team worked with the victim-survivors who came forward following the indictment. Trust in authorities could not be assumed, and had to be built. A vetted cultural mediator was contracted to support contact between survivors, investigators and court officials, information on applying for redress was made available in survivors’ own languages, and the sentencing was livestreamed in Dutch, English and Tigrinya. This people-centred approach is a defining feature of CILC’s work: bridging the sometimes abstract language of justice and the rule of law with practical arrangements that make institutions accessible to the people they exist to serve.

The feature also covers the wider IAMROC agenda, including training for law enforcement, judiciary and prosecutors in partner countries on international legal cooperation and on investigating and prosecuting the financial dimensions of migrant smuggling, alongside investigative techniques covering trafficking in human beings, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, arbitrary detention and forced labour along the Central Mediterranean Route.

CILC thanks Jolanda de Boer and the Dutch National Public Prosecutor’s Office, and all Joint Team partners, for the work behind this result.

Read the full article on the ICMPD website: Long and winding the road may be – but justice always prevails – ICMPD

About the project

IAMROC (Innovative Approaches to Migration-Related Organised Crime) is co-funded by the European Union through the Migration Partnership Facility run by ICMPD, and implemented by CILC together with the Dutch National Public Prosecutor’s Office. The project cooperates with the Joint Team, which includes the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, the International Criminal Court and Europol’s European Centre Against Migrant Smuggling.

Two things I’ve deliberately left for you to confirm: whether your site’s house style is to pull Georgia’s quotes from the ICMPD piece into the CILC version, which would lengthen it but add a CILC voice, and whether you need a disclaimer line to mirror ICMPD’s on EU funding and responsibility for content.