Several humanitarian organizations, including Amnesty International, have called for the European Union to evacuate thousands of refugees from the regions around Libyan detention centers where they face disease, malnourishment and physical danger.
This week European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels, with a fairly hefty agenda. Dominating the talks was the disintegrating Iran nuclear deal, as well as a clash with Turkey over drilling in Cyprus.
Lower on the agenda was the estimated 5,800 refugees and migrants languishing in detention centers across Libya. The majority of these people are refugees and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who were either attempting to cross the Mediterranean and then were turned back by the Libyan coastguard or were detained before they could even get to a boat.
Within the centers migrants live in conditions described as "ghastly," "inhumane" and "degrading" by the UNHRC. Sally Hayden is a journalist who has covered the plight of detainees in Libya for a long time. She says the inmates she speaks to on a daily basis describe an unimaginably grim reality in the centers: "Dozens, if not hundreds, have died in detention from abuse and neglect. Others have spent months or years locked up. They are out of money, many have tuberculosis or other diseases, are seriously malnourished or badly traumatized from what they’ve experienced inside detention."
And it's not just within the centers. Libya has long been considered an unsafe place for refugees and migrants, and the recent bombing of a detention center in the east of the capital Tripoli, killing at least 53 people, as well as continued violence and disruption all over the capital, have only made this clearer.
Now, human rights organizations Amnesty, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) are calling on the EU to evacuate detainees, not just from the centers, but from the conflicted regions altogether, to other parts of Libya or even to the EU itself. This call is not just an appeal to humanitarian sentiment, it is a direct rebuke of EU policy which has lead to this situation.
“We believe EU states have had, and continue to have, a responsibility in those people being locked in those places,” says Matteo de Bellis of Amnesty International. “The EU member states have contributed in many different ways to the increased capacity of the Libyan authorities to intercept men, women and children at sea and take them back to Libya where they are arbitrarily placed in detention centers where torture, exploitation and sexual violence are widespread.”
What de Bellis is describing is a pattern of the EU off-shoring the detention and care of refugees and migrants to other countries, some of which are absurdly unsuitable. As has been seen previously with the EU-Turkey deal and the Khartoum Process, the EU has effectively paid the Libyan authorities (or rather, the Libyan authorities they recognize, there's more than one group claiming power) to recapture and detain migrants attempting to reach Europe. Alongside direct material assistance, such as the patrol boats donated by Italy and training provided to the Libyan coastguard via Operation Sophia, EU funds have been directed to Libyan authorities via investment projects through the EU Trust Fund For Africa.
The EU itself describes these projects as being designed "to strengthen the capacity of relevant Libyan authorities in the areas of border and migration management, including border control and surveillance, addressing smuggling and trafficking of human beings, search and rescue at sea and in the desert."
De Bellis says these projects amount to over $100 million in funds directed to the Libyan authorities: "We're talking about investing in projects that have the end result of empowering the Libyan authorities to act, which is extremely serious."
Amnesty, HRW and ECRE claim the EU is yet to demonstrate the Libyan authorities can properly take care of detainees, as they claim. They say it's time for the EU to take over responsibility and evacuate the migrants themselves, rather than continue to pay Libya to handle it for them.
De Bellis says part of the problem standing in the way of the EU doing more on this issue is a constant crisis-mode kind of strategy-making. They cut deals that may make sense in the short term to reduce the horrific death toll on the Mediterranean, but over time these deals can easily create dangerous and damaging situations in themselves.
"Considering the fact that the number of arrivals in Europe has decreased significantly, we hope that this may create the political space for a more serious debate about the range of measures and policies that need to be adopted. What we cannot allow is that the European governments become content with the fact that arrivals are going down, and forget about the horrific consequences of externalization of border control to North African countries, and in this particular case, to Libya."
Echoing the calls from Amnesty and others, Hayden says the EU needs to do more than just insist the detention centers be closed: “The refugees I’m speaking to are wondering what will happen to them in a war zone where they’re exploited, abused and held for ransom by both trafficking gangs and militias, particularly, as looks likely, if the EU keeps spending tens of millions on funding interceptions by the Libyan coastguard.”
