Young Migrant Men and the Digital Struggle for Justice
In March 2019, three teenagers – Abdalla Bari, Abdul Kader, and Amara Kromah – came under international scrutiny when they were prosecuted in Malta in one of the European Union’s (EU’s) most contentious migration-related cases. Then aged 19, 16, and 15, they were among more than 100 asylum seekers who had been rescued in the Mediterranean and taken aboard the tanker El Hiblu 1.[i] Acting as interpreters between the rescued and the ship’s captain, the trio persuaded the crew not to return to Libya, which was deemed to be an unsafe country under international law.
However, when the teenagers arrived in Malta, they were arrested and charged with multiple offences, including terrorism. Observers condemned the charges as a politically motivated attempt to criminalise survival and deter resistance.[ii] Seven years later, the young men’s case remains unresolved, and they continue to live under restrictive bail conditions despite an absence of incriminating evidence.[iii]
Over this period, Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara, known as the El Hiblu Three, have become the symbols of a solidarity campaign launched by a group of rescue non-governmental organisations (NGOs).[iv] The campaign, Free the El Hiblu 3, unites activists, scholars, and civil society organisations that use online and offline advocacy practices to challenge the security focus of the EU’s border regime and promote alternative concepts of rights and justice.
This chapter uses the case of the El Hiblu Three to examine how young migrant men assert their political agency in a European context that denies them visibility and a voice. The prosecutions of Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara exemplify a broader contradiction: while international organisations increasingly celebrate youth participation, their structures and policies often provide only limited access to decision-making and rights for young people in precarious legal and social positions – or even silence those they claim to empower.[v]
Thus, although young migrants have been recognised as political actors, this recognition is tokenistic. Yet young migrants have long mobilised against systemic injustice. Their engagement – from protests to art to online networking – reshapes dominant narratives of migration and creates digital and political spaces in which they can reclaim their rights.[vi]
Focusing on the El Hiblu Three, this chapter has a twofold aim. First, it seeks to highlight the contradictory treatment of precarious young people, especially migrant men, whose claims to rights are routinely cast as illegitimate. Young people are celebrated as “actors of change for human rights”, in the words of the European External Action Service.[vii] Yet young men like Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara are criminalised when they exercise their agency and are reduced to security threats. Second, the chapter aims to illustrate how online solidarity campaigns unsettle these dynamics. By amplifying excluded voices, the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign shows how alternative concepts of justice and participation emerge from the margins of formal structures.
Digital advocacy, online publications, and collective storytelling do not merely supplement institutional mechanisms; they reconfigure the rights landscape by creating openings denied by formal institutions. This chapter approaches rights as performative acts that bring young migrant men into being as political subjects. The analysis draws on a curated set of materials from the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign: social media posts, website content, and a co-authored publication. Rather than measuring outreach or institutional uptake, the chapter examines how such materials reframe narratives and generate new vocabularies of rights, participation, and belonging.
Ajda Hedžet is a researcher on youth political participation whose work examines how young people are often excluded from decision-making due to narrow definitions of politics, while highlighting the diverse and creative forms of youth engagement beyond traditional political channels.
Young migrants and the politics of non-recognition
Migration governance, at both the global and the regional level, is shaped largely by adult perspectives. Within these frameworks, young people who are not citizens face heightened scrutiny and diminished legitimacy, and are often treated as outsiders or potential threats. At the same time, the fragmented structure of global migration governance relies on relatively weak institutional mechanisms. This fragmentation gives regional initiatives, agencies, and intergovernmental collaborations disproportionate influence over the governance of mobility while allowing for persistent breaches of rights.
Human and children’s rights frameworks often reinforce the exclusions faced by young migrants. International law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, sees children as sedentary, innocent, and in need of protection – an image that rarely matches the realities of young people on the move. Young migrants, especially those who cross borders irregularly or unaccompanied, fall outside this archetype. What is more, gendered constructions intensify this marginal status, as boys are portrayed as threatening outsiders who endanger moral and social order while girls appear as vulnerable objects of protection.[viii]
This liminal positioning means that young migrant men are neither recognised as children with rights nor treated as being in need of care. Instead, they become figures to be “controlled, expelled, or legislated against”, in the words of a 2018 study – framings that constrain their ability to claim political rights or asylum.[ix]
Europe provides a clear illustration of these tensions. The EU coordinates asylum and migration frameworks across its member states and has some of the world’s most advanced human rights protection mechanisms. Yet at the same time, the bloc enforces restrictive migration policies that enable deportations to unsafe states, normalise systemic rights violations, undermine search-and-rescue operations, and deny basic protections to those classified as outsiders. In this context, young migrants, particularly those labelled irregular or non-citizens, face a greater risk of exclusion and criminalisation and are rarely recognised as subjects with rights.[x]
The case of the El Hiblu Three illustrates this dynamic vividly. Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara were portrayed not as children or asylum seekers but as pirates and migrants, symbols of deviance and danger, and “scapegoats for Europe’s search and rescue failures”, according to Amnesty International.[xi] Abdul and Amara’s legal status as children, which should have guaranteed them special protection, was disregarded.
Media coverage amplified this narrative, describing a “pirated vessel”[xii] and declaring that “rescued migrants hijack ship, demand it head towards Europe”.[xiii] Other reports noted that police arrested “five men”, while women and children were escorted off separately, reinforcing gendered distinctions of innocence and threat.[xiv]
The EU’s own publications extended this framing. The EU Handbook on Victims of Terrorism, issued by the EU Centre of Expertise for Victims of Terrorism, presented the El Hiblu Three case as a textbook example of a terrorist attack: “Through coercive action, a group of men had hijacked the ship.”[xv] By recasting minors as “men” within counter-terrorism narratives, EU institutions erased the child status of Abdul and Amara and legitimised their criminalisation. Such exclusionary depictions shape both policies and public perceptions.
The El Hiblu Three case thus exposes the dangers of reductive representations of young migrant men used to justify punitive migration policies. Institutional and media narratives that criminalise young people at the intersection of migration and security deny them not only their rights but also their recognition as political subjects.
Rights and recognition online
Despite years of dehumanisation, rights violations, and prosecution in adult courts, Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara continued to claim their rights. In collaboration with transnational advocacy networks and through grassroots organising and digital activism, they generated alternative concepts of rights and belonging. Their struggles underscore the need to analyse not only their limited rights and access to institutions but also the narrative battles that regulate who can speak and on what terms.
To capture these dynamics, this chapter adopts a methodology that draws on the theory of performativity and an account of rights as translation.[xvi] Together, these perspectives conceptualise youth participation not simply as formal inclusion but as a process through which marginalised actors become audible and visible within constrained regimes of recognition.
From these perspectives, rights claims articulated from the EU’s external border are not just appeals for recognition but interventions that contest the boundaries of legitimacy. For young men portrayed as threatening or illegible, claiming rights requires translational acts that recast their position across regimes of recognition.
This analysis draws on materials produced by and around the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign: a 120-page book of testimonies, interviews, and visual materials produced by Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara alongside educators, artists, and activists;[xvii] online archives of testimonies, news stories, and other information;[xviii] and a dataset of 505 posts with the hashtag #ElHiblu3 from the platform X (formerly Twitter) on 22 November 2022.[xix] The material focuses on moments of heightened collective visibility, when rights claims were channelled through intensified affective practices.
This snapshot does not aim to capture the full scope of the campaign’s digital presence but to examine how rights, solidarity, and political subjectivity are articulated in moments of concentrated attention. The dataset thus foregrounds transnational solidarity as conveyed through performative rights-claiming practices, rather than expressions of individual authorship.
The analysis pays particular attention to the symbolic and affective dimensions of rights claiming, and to the ways in which hashtags, testimonies, and visual elements resonate with audiences. This approach aligns with scholarship on digital rights activism, which treats online practices as embodied, affective, and performative.[xx] Far from being merely symbolic, the digital domain functions as a crucial site where rights are enacted, political actors emerge, and dominant framings of young migrants are unsettled.
The Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign contests institutional framings while refusing to conform to expectations of legitimacy. The campaign does not merely protest the injustices faced by the three young men; it enacts a broader performative practice through which young migrant men become political subjects and the landscape of rights and recognition in the EU is reconfigured.
Digital solidarity against criminalisation
Legal scholars emphasise that the actions of Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara aboard El Hiblu 1 in March 2019 did not meet the threshold for piracy under international law, as they were passengers acting collectively to protect themselves with no intent to seek private gain.[xxi] The charges were therefore aimed as a deterrent, a symbolic way of criminalising survival and resistance that ignores established norms of human and children’s rights.[xxii]
“I Am Not a Terrorist!”
The Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign offers a key counternarrative. The campaign website and book position the three young men as agents of collective survival, framing their refusal to return to Libya as an act of resistance. The charges were described in one analysis as “weaponizing the law against the vulnerable”.[xxiii] This reframing transforms the narrative from threat to solidarity and from deviance to dignity.
The campaign emphasises the status of Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara as adolescents navigating the contradictions of migration governance. In this situation, they are neither passive victims nor minors in need of protection but actors who are confronting systemic exclusions. The campaign exemplifies how marginalised young people perform their rights within structures that criminalise survival. Testimonies, digital expressions, and collective storytelling reconfigure the labels that are imposed on young people, such as “pirates”, “terrorists”, and “migrants”, into affirmations of dignity and political presence.
The testimonies of Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara further highlight the discursive violence of criminalisation and the affective labour of reclaiming a voice.[xxiv] In “Shattered Dreams”, Abdalla situates his journey within intergenerational loss and precarity. He describes how structural inequality and exclusion force young people to migrate. Abdalla’s account of being separated from his wife and accused of terrorism, despite acting as an interpreter on the El Hiblu 1, highlights the dissonance between the humanitarian discourse and the punishing governance of an EU member: “The Maltese state accused us of being pirates, terrorists and all kinds of things, which I still don’t understand.”[xxv]
Abdul’s account, “My True Story”, transforms the theme of migrant youth through the counternarrative of endurance. In his words: “I held onto the hope that I was heading for a land of opportunity. Instead, I found myself in a horrific situation in Libya. My dream became a nightmare as armed men regularly exploited me for unpaid labour … My life became characterised by fear and hopelessness in Libya.”[xxvi] For Abdul, migration was the pursuit of a better life.
Meanwhile, in “I Am Not a Terrorist!”, Amara recounts his imprisonment, forced labour, and escape: “Those who didn’t pay were beaten … I spent about nine months in prison working in the fields without being paid.”[xxvii] His refusal to accept the status of a criminal culminates in his declaration that “I feel lucky and I thank God that I am still alive … I am afraid I will again miss work and lose my job.”[xxviii]
Jointly, the three testimonies produce a subject who resists criminalisation by telling the truth. Other commentators who stood in solidarity with the trio echoed and amplified this process online. Social media posts declared: “They are not terrorists. They are not pirates. They are not criminals. They are heroes. They are human.”[xxix] Others underlined the paradox behind the act for which they were being prosecuted: “Three youths could be jailed for life for saving the lives of fellow refugees on the Mediterranean.”[xxx]
Such posts, which were widely shared, collectively countered the young men’s criminalisation, with each repost performing an act of refusal and solidarity. Hashtags like #FreeElHiblu3 and #DropTheCharges functioned as digital chants, turning the individual cry of “I am not a terrorist” into a collective statement of resistance. The posts not only contested the criminal label but also criticised celebrations of youth voices that exclude young people in precarious situations. The campaign thus exposed the contradictions in heralding youth activism while disregarding the criminalisation of young migrants who assert their rights.
A sea of solidarity
Beyond contesting criminalisation, the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign generated an affective politics of solidarity. Across its online ecosystem, the campaign’s selfies, hashtags, video testimonies, drawings, and messages of solidarity turned trauma into transnational connections. NGOs such as Sea-Watch and Alarm Phone, youth collectives, activist groups, and supporters contributed to amplifying the campaign’s messages across languages and platforms.
Among the most widely circulated posts, one drawing portrayed the three young men embracing, with the caption “Migrants trying to escape from inhumane conditions and those in solidarity with them become criminalised”.[xxxi] Another viral post showed graffiti on a Berlin train reading “Free El Hiblu 3 – This train is unstoppable”, in a metaphor for unstoppable justice.[xxxii] These creative acts are a way of claiming rights and remind observers that recognition can be enacted, not merely requested.
The campaign’s website and book represent spaces of co-authorship. Abdalla’s, Abdul’s, and Amara’s oral and written testimonies are accompanied by letters, essays, and art by activists, rescue workers, NGOs, and youth collectives.[xxxiii] This solidarity shows how digital activism produces relational rather than representational politics. As publics unite around shared feelings and issues, they can create new vocabularies of belonging that go beyond national and legal boundaries. The campaign thus converts isolation into visibility and speech into solidarity, with each post, visual, or story representing a micro-act that turns marginalisation into a collective right to speak.
Rethinking youth participation in EU migration governance
Young migrants resist their exclusion from political and legal spheres in Europe through performative practices of claiming their rights. By tracing how the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign transformed acts of criminalisation into collective expressions of dignity and solidarity, this study has revealed how Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara became political subjects through the creation of new grammars of rights and recognition.
This case study lays bare an important inconsistency of EU migration governance. While global and regional policymaking increasingly celebrates youth inclusion, those whose voices most urgently demand justice, such as young migrants, are silenced or criminalised when their agency unsettles the securitised order of Europe’s borders.
The Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign exposes the rarely recognised limits of young people’s institutional participation and reveals how justice is being reimagined from below and from the margins. Human rights exist not only in court rooms or policy frameworks but also in digital, creative, and collective practices that turn silence into speech and isolation into solidarity. Testimonies, hashtags, artwork, and collaborative publications become acts through which recognition is not requested but enacted. Rights emerge as living, affective practices that are disruptive, relational, and grounded in a shared struggle.
In this way, the campaign unsettles the institutionalised models of youth participation that international organisations often celebrate. Whereas EU frameworks tend to value compliant voices that are aligned with institutional norms, the Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign embodies resistance, through which participants refuse to be co-opted and insist on justice over visibility. Abdalla, Abdul, and Amara are therefore not anomalies but representatives of a wider young generation whose agency is forged through exclusion.
Ultimately, to take their struggle seriously is to recognise that political agency and justice do not wait for institutional validation. Rather, agency and justice come about through refusal and an insistence on being heard. The Free the El Hiblu 3 campaign serves as a reminder that the boundaries of Europe’s migration governance are also the front lines of democratic renewal, where the fight for a voice becomes a fight for justice itself.
This chapter is part of a Deep Dive of Young Researchers who worked on Youth Participation for three years. This deep dive is a global collection of 12 case studies unpacking how young people are reshaping political engagement.
The Young Researchers’ Network is an initiative developed in the framework of the European Democracy Hub and EPD’s Women and Youth in Democracy WYDE Civic Engagement project, supported by the European Union.
[i] “About”, El Hiblu 3 Coalition, https://elhiblu3coalition.org/about/.
[ii] Jelka Kretzschmar and Julienne Schembri, “Abuse of the El Hiblu 3: The Three Young Men in the El Hiblu Case Are Still in Legal Limbo”, Times of Malta, 1 April 2025, https://timesofmalta.com/article/abuse-el-hiblu-3.1107424.
[iii] Kretzschmar and Schembri, “Abuse”.
[iv] “The Free El Hiblu 3 Campaign”, Civil MRCC, 26 July 2022, https://civilmrcc.eu/mobilisation/the-free-el-hiblu-3-campaign/.
[v] Tomaž Pušnik, “Institutionalisation of Youth Political Participation in the EU”, Teorija in praksa 61, no. 2 (2024): 341–62, http://www.dlib.si/?URN=URN:NBN:SI:doc-GEXPSP3R.
[vi] Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, Amanda Alencar, and Yan Asadchy, “Precarious Migrants in a Sharing Economy | #Migrantes on TikTok: Exploring Platformed Belongings”, Media and Communication 16 (2022), 5578–602, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/17435.
[vii] “Youth as Actors of Change for Human Rights”, European External Action Service, 13 December 2023, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/youth-actors-change-human-rights_en.
[viii] Lesley Pruitt, Helen Berents, and Gayle Munro, “Gender and Age in the Construction of Male Youth in the European Migration ‘Crisis’”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 3 (2018): 687–709, https://doi.org/10.1086/695304.
[ix] Pruitt et al., “Gender”.
[x] Jacqueline Bhabha, “Arendt’s Children: Do Today’s Migrant Children Have a Right to Have Rights?”, Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2009): 410–51, https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.0.0072.
[xi] “Malta: Authorities Must Not Make El Hiblu 3 ‘Scapegoats for Europe’s Search and Rescue Failures’”, Amnesty International, 29 May 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/05/malta-authorities-must-not-make-el-hiblu-3-scapegoats-for-europes-search-and-rescue-failures/.
[xii] “AFM on Alert as Hijacked Ship Heads for Maltese Waters”, Times of Malta, 27 March 2019, https://timesofmalta.com/article/migrants-take-over-merchant-ship-heading-for-malta-or-lampedusa.705731.
[xiii] Stephen Calleja and Vanessa Gera, “Rescued Migrants Hijack Ship, Demand It Head Toward Europe”, Associated Press, 28 March 2019, https://apnews.com/article/1bbb896679754fd59357f0bdc60b94af.
[xiv] Chris Scicluna, “Italy Blames ‘Pirates’ after Malta Halts Hijacking of Migrant Boat”, Irish Independent, 29 March 2019, https://www.independent.ie/news/italy-blames-pirates-after-malta-halts-hijacking-of-migrant-boat/37962720.html.
[xv] EU Centre of Expertise for Victims of Terrorism, EU Handbook on Victims of Terrorism: National Handbook for Malta (Brussels: European Commission, 2021), https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-07/eucvt_handbook_for_malta_2021_en.pdf.
[xvi] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999); Kathryn McNeilly, “After the Critique of Rights: For a Radical Democratic Theory and Practice of Human Rights”, Law and Critique 27 (2016): 269–88, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9189-9.
[xvii] Jelka Kretzschmar (ed.), Free the El Hiblu 3 (Free the El Hiblu 3, 2022), https://elhiblu3.info/FreeEH3_book.pdf.
[xviii] “El Hiblu 3”, Free the El Hiblu 3, https://elhiblu3.info/.
[xix] Data from X was collected in November 2022 to predate the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk, after which significant changes were made to its functionality, governance, and data accessibility. These changes compromised the continuity and representativeness of the platform’s public discourse and severely limited access for researchers, making later data less suitable for analysis.
[xx] Roopika Risam, “Now You See Them: Self-Representation and the Refugee Selfie”, Popular Communication 16, no. 1 (2018): 58–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1413191.
[xxi]Valentin Schatz, “The Alleged Seizure of the El Hiblu 1 by Rescued Migrants: Not a Case of Piracy under the Law of the Sea”, Völkerrechtsblog, 31 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.17176/20190401-161334-0
[xxii] Daniela De Bono and Ċetta Mainwaring, “Weaponizing the Law against the Vulnerable: The Case of the El Hiblu 3”, University of Oxford, Faculty of Law Blogs, Border Criminologies, 5 January 2024, https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/123350/1/Weaponizing_the_law_against_the_vulnerable__the_case_of_the_El_Hiblu_3%282024%29.pdf.
[xxiii] De Bono and Mainwaring, “Weaponizing”.
[xxiv] Abdalla Bari, “Shattered Dreams”, Free the El Hiblu 3, https://www.elhiblu3.info/abdalla.html; Abdul Kader, “My True Story”, Free the El Hiblu 3, https://www.elhiblu3.info/kader.html; Amara Kromah, “I Am Not a Terrorist!”, Free the El Hiblu 3, https://www.elhiblu3.info/amara.html.
[xxv] Bari, “Shattered Dreams”.
[xxvi] Kader, “My True Story”.
[xxvii] Kromah, “I Am Not a Terrorist!”.
[xxviii] Kromah, “I Am Not a Terrorist!”.
[xxix] Thousand 4 £1000 (T4K), “#FreeElHiblu3 The amazing, shocking story of Amara, Abdul and Abdalla needs to be better known …”, X, 30 December 2021, https://x.com/ThousandFor1000/status/1476516603353305088.
[xxx] Seebrücke Frankfurt, “#FreeElHiblu3. Three youths could be jailed for life for saving the lives of fellow refugees on the Mediterranean …”, X, 25 March 2021, https://x.com/SeebrueckeFfm/status/1375097396670124042.
[xxxi] El Hiblu 3, “While we witness how EU member states and institutions continue to break international law through violent push-backs as well as forms of non-assistance and abandonment …”, X, 26 March 2021, https://x.com/ElHiblu3/status/1375373638971617283.
[xxxii] El Hiblu 3, “This train is unstoppable: Free the #ElHiblu3”, X, 18 April 2021, https://x.com/ElHiblu3/status/1383864317146058757.
[xxxiii] Coalition for the El Hiblu 3, “Human Rights Defenders Award Video of the El Hiblu Three in Malta”, Vimeo, 29 October 2024, https://vimeo.com/1024466132?fl=pl&fe=sh; “Malta and the El Hiblu 3”, BBC, 5 August 2021, https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p09r9l73.