Alwaght- The UN denounced the EU policy of supporting Libyan regime intercept migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to prisons as “inhuman".
UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, issued a statement issued on Tuesday and said “The European Union’s policy of assisting the Libyan coastguard to intercept and return migrants in the Mediterranean [is] inhuman.”
“The suffering of migrants detained in Libya is an outrage to the conscience of humanity,” UN official added.
Warning that “the detention system for migrants in Libya is broken beyond repair," Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein emphasized that “The international community cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the unimaginable horrors endured by migrants in Libya, and pretend that the situation can be remedied only by improving conditions in detention,”
Chaos-ridden Libya has long been a major transit hub for people trying to reach Europe. Many have fallen prey to serious abuse in the country at the hands of traffickers and others.
According to Libya’s department of combating illegal migration some 20,000 people were being held in facilities under its control in early November, up from about 7,000 in mid-September.
The increase came after authorities detained thousands of people previously held by smugglers in Libya’s trafficking hub Sabratha, west of Tripoli.
Hussein said UN staff members had visited four DCIM facilities earlier this month and were shocked by what they saw. “[There were] thousands of emaciated and traumatised men, women and children piled on top of each other, locked up in hangars with no access to the most basic necessities, and stripped of their human dignity,” he said.
People including children described horrific beatings by guards at detention centres, while many women said they faced rape and other sexual violence at the hands of smugglers and guards.
One woman told UN staff she was gang-raped by three men, including a DCIM guard, while another woman said four armed men had gang-raped her during her journey, when she was pregnant.
“I bled profusely, and I think I lost the baby. I haven’t seen a doctor yet,” she said.
The UN urged Libyan authorities to take concrete steps to halt violations and abuses in the detention centres, and stop detaining migrants.
“The increasing interventions of the EU and its member states have done nothing so far to reduce the level of abuses suffered by migrants,” Hussein said, adding that instead, there appeared to be a “fast deterioration in their situation in Libya”.
