The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report on Tuesday that found “patterns of human rights violations and abuses perpetrated with impunity against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Libya,” including torture, murder, sexual violence, and human trafficking.
The report, titled “Business as Usual” and co-authored with the U.N. Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), found that migrants are “forcibly rounded up, abducted, separated from their families, arbitrarily arrested and detained, and transferred without due process” to a mixture of “official, unofficial, or illegal detention facilities.” The migrants and their families are often forced to pay ransom to secure their release.
The title of the report was derived from the way this system of exploitation has become “a brutal and normalized reality,” woven from “deliberate, profit-driven practices that together form a ruthless and violent business model.”
The U.N. said these horrors are perpetrated by “organized networks with ties to State actors,” but also made room to slam European countries for allegedly turning Libya into a warehouse for would-be immigrants and refugees with their “restrictive migration policies.” The implication was that Europe could alleviate the problem by opening its borders to endless migration across the Mediterranean and thus draining the pool of potential victims for Libyan kidnappers and rapists.
The report still acknowledged that most of the problem is caused by misgovernance in Libya, by all of the many factions and governments jostling for control of the country since the ouster and death of dictator Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, even though Libya is a longstanding signatory to treaties against slavery, torture, and arbitrary detention.
Unfortunately, Libya has no specific laws against human trafficking and grants no special status to refugees or asylum-seekers. Even if it did, the fractured country would have a difficult time enforcing such regulations.
Instead, Libya has a harsh ban on illegally entering the country, which states that violators can be fined, deported, or “penalized by detention with hard labor.” A large number of migrants find themselves in the hands of armed groups that decide to go with the third option.
Libya is also the jumping-off point for treacherous seaborne migration to coastal Europe. International media largely lost interest in stories of people drowning while trying to cross the Mediterranean after European powers began opening their borders a decade ago, but many migrants are still dying, including children.
The report noted that the Mediterranean remains “one of the deadliest migratory routes in the world,” with 33,348 deaths and disappearances reported since 2014 – which is right around the time global media stopped caring about children getting killed on risky migrant boats.
Seagoing migrants who do not die are often returned to the coast of Libya, where they fall prey to the machinery designed to exploit them. The U.N. report noted that ocean interceptions performed by Libyan actors were particularly dangerous, including “hazardous maneuvers and excessive use of force.”
The Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) has also been known to fire on humanitarian vessels attempting to rescue migrants at sea. The U.N. accused Libyan authorities of sometimes “deporting” rejected migrants by tossing them into the Sahara Desert without much in the way of supplies. Migrants with enough money to pay bribes were frequent targets of extortion.
The U.N. report was critical of European governments for both formally and informally relying on partnerships with Libyan entities to control migration, although it is not clear what alternative they have, in the absence of a strong and responsible central Libyan government.
OHCHR found major “hubs for human trafficking” in Tobruk, Benghazi, and Ajdabiya, where some of the most notorious illegal detention facilities apparently “affiliated with military actors in the east” are located. Rescue operations have recovered malnourished and diseased women and children from these facilities.
Libyan traffickers have allegedly formed partnerships with slavers in Sudan. Some of their victims are forced into prostitution or used as forced laborers, while others are held for ransom – with cash demands ranging from $500 to over $10,000 in American currency. Some of the captives are forced to “pay” their own ransoms by spending months and years as forced laborers. Others are tortured or sexually abused to incentivize their families to meet ransom demands.
The report found that even some migrants who find accommodations and work in Libya are victimized by government officials, as they face arbitrary arrest and abuse while in police custody.
“Accountability for such abuses remains extremely limited, with authorities either unwilling or unable to pursue accountability measures for gross violations of international human rights law,” the report said. “Only a small number of criminal proceedings have been initiated against alleged perpetrators.”
OHCHR concluded that Libya’s “restrictive approaches” to migration, which “prioritize deterrence over the protection of migrants,” combined with “the absence of adequate safe and regular migration pathways, the criminalization of irregular entry, stay, and exit, and a lack of alternatives to detention” were sustaining a human-rights catastrophe.
The report also blamed “pervasive discrimination, racism, and xenophobia” for keeping migrants out of the legitimate Libyan labor pool and denying them access to even minimal social services.
Since reform is unlikely to flow organically from Libya’s fractured systems of government, the U.N. said the “international community” has a “responsibility to ensure that the protection of the rights of migrants” is taken seriously – especially those members of the “international community” who have bilateral agreements with Libyan officials.
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