The Libyan coastguard this week said it had intercepted some 500 migrants out at sea and brought them back to the Northern African nation during the course of 72 hours.
The news comes just as Human Rights Watch has released a damning report in which it accuses the EU of contributing to the extreme abuse of migrants in Libya, saying the bloc is condemning the migrants to “nightmarish detention”.
During the course of four different rescue operations, conducted over a three-day period, the Libyan coastguard said it had intercepted and brought back a total of 473 migrants to its shores. Coastguard spokesman Ayoub Kacem said most of them were from Africa, Syria and Bangladesh.
On Sunday, two migrants were found “frozen to death” on a makeshift raft off the Libyan coast, and 140 others were intercepted after having spent more than 24 hours out at sea, he said.
Kacem said that two merchant vessels had responded to the coastguard’s demand to assist them in the rescue operation of two migrant boats. One of them was a Sierra Leone-flagged ship, which rescued 141 people, including 25 women and two children, after the migrants had sent an alert to Alarm Phone – a system especially designed for people finding themselves in a distressed situation at sea. All of these migrants were then brought back to Libya, he said.
'No escape from hell'
On Monday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 70-page report titled“’No Escape from Hell’: EU Policies Contribute to Abuse of Migrants in Libya” and in which the group underscored the “nightmarish” conditions migrants face in Libyan detention centers.
In July, 2018, the NGO interviewed more than 100 migrants being held in four official detention centres in western Libya: the Ain Zara and Tajoura detention centers in Tripoli, the al-Karareem detention center in Misrata, and the Zuwara detention center in the city of the same name. The authors of the report said they had found “severe overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of adequate health care." The authors also reported that they had found evidence of violent abuse by guards.
“They beat me three different times when I was getting food,” Elijah, a migrant from Sierra Leone, testified in the report. “They make us sit and look straight at the sun. We protested so they hit us,” he said. A pregnant woman from Nigeria described how she was beaten by the guards with a hose when she went to get water. And an Egyptian migrant described how his clothes were full of ticks and lice. “We’re only allowed out to shower every 10 days or so,” he said.
'Extreme abuse'
Based on its findings, HRW said that “European Union policies contribute to a cycle of extreme abuse against migrants in Libya,” adding that the EU has in fact contributed to the overcrowding of Libyan detention centers as well as the deteriorating conditions of them.
Since 2016, “the EU and particular member states have poured millions of euros into programs to beef up the Libyan Coast Guard’s capacity to intercept boats leaving Libya, fully aware that everyone is then automatically detained in indefinite, arbitrary detention without judicial review,” it said.
Italy has even taken the lead in providing material and technical assistance to the Libyan coastguard, it said, “and abdicated virtually all responsibility for coordinating rescue operations at sea, to limit the number of people arriving on its shores."
Judith Sunderland, associate Europe director at HRW, said that “EU leaders know how bad things are in Libya, but continue to provide political and material support to prop up a rotten system."
“To avoid complicity in gross human rights abuses, Italy and its EU partners should rethink their strategy to truly press for fundamental reforms and ending automatic detention,” she said.
SOURCE: Infomigrants
