MSF warns EU about inhumane approach to migration as leaders meet to discuss cooperation with Libya

London/Amsterdam, 3 February 2017: As EU leaders meet in Malta today to discuss migration, with a view to “close down the route from Libya to Italy” by stepping up cooperation with the Libyan authorities, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) raises grave concerns about the fate of people trapped in Libya or returned to the country. 

“The European Union and its Member States need a reality check. Libya is not a safe place - there is no way can this be considered a humane approach to migration management” said Arjan Hehenkamp, MSF’s General Director who returned from Tripoli yesterday (February 2nd, 2017) after visiting migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers detained in the Libyan capital. 

The international humanitarian organization has been providing medical care to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers detained in Tripoli and its surroundings since July 2016 and says people are detained arbitrarily in inhumane and unsanitary conditions, often without enough food and clean water and with a lack of access to medical care.

Hehenkamp continues, “There is currently a breakdown in law and order in Libya. Sub-saharan Africans are being detained with no due legal process and with no way to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. Detainees are desperate to let their families know they are alive, they have virtually no access to the outside world. Those I spoke to did not know what was going to happen to them despite being held for months.

“We’re working in seven detention centres in and around Tripoli but even the better ones where we work do not meet any national, regional or international standards. People are held in inhumane conditions. There’s little natural light or ventilation and many facilities are dangerously overcrowded. The lack of human dignity was staggering. MSF medics are treating around 500 people a week for respiratory tract infections, acute watery diarrhoea, skin disease, and urinary tract infections - these complaints are mostly related to conditions inside the detention centres. 

“Shortage of food in the detention centres in a real concern – we’re seeing adults suffering from malnutrition and people are more susceptible to disease and acute illness. Detainees do not have adequate access to safe drinking water, sometimes less than one litre per person per day, and access to latrines or showers is severely limited resulting in high rates of skin infections and infestations with lice, scabies and fleas.”

MSF teams conducting search and rescue activities on the Mediterranean have rescued more than 50,000 men, women and children since beginning operations in 2015. The teams have documented many firsthand accounts of the alarming level of violence and exploitation they experienced inside Libya at the hands of security forces, militias, smuggling networks, criminal gangs and private individuals.

“The absence of a functioning asylum system in Libya means that in the current circumstances, people seeking international protection cannot be processed in a fair and efficient way - in accordance with international and regional refugee law, says Hehenkamp. 

“The EU is misrepresenting the reality on the ground, Libya is not a safe place and blocking people in the country or returning them to Libya makes a mockery of the EU’s so-called fundamental values of human dignity and rule of law.”

ENDS