The Gourougou Trial (2022)

N.D. and N.T., two young men from Mali and Ivory Coast, leave their homes and undertake a long journey to Europe. They reach Morocco, where they remain for two months in an illegal camp on Gourougou Mountain, very close to the Spanish border in Melilla. We met them in this camp. Two weeks after meeting out protagonists we follow them in the dead of night as they descend the mountain and scale a huge metal border fence and cross into Spanish soil. However, as soon they are across the border they are arrested and immediately returned to Morocco under a procedure known as "pushback", an instantaneous deportation. Two lawyers with the German non-profit organization European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) Hanaa and Carsten commence and fight an action against the Spanish state for violating the European Convention in the treatment of the migrants using pushback. Heard before the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg we follow the trial as Spain protests its right to use pushback under certain circumstances. It is a judicial thriller where European political power and two migrants are confronted, revealing a gulf between the institutions that determine Europe's migration management strategy and the reality of those suffering the consequences.