by Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analysis

3 October 2019

Last week, the European Council voted to extend Operation Sophia (OS) – the EU anti-migrant-smuggling mission along the Libyan Mediterranean coast – until the end of March 2020.

OS has been at the forefront of activists' criticisms of the EU’s handling of the humanitarian crisis, unfolding since 2015.

And until recently, those operational missions were carried out by Member States’ vessels and the people they saved were disembarked on European soil.

But when Italy’s far-right and anti-immigration government vetoed the OS use of European vessels, it shifted the mission’s focus on training the Libyan Coast Guard and to air surveillance support.

Since there no longer are any European vessels involved, by prolonging the legal status of the mission, EU leaders are implicitly legitimizing Libya’s Coast Guard despite its well-known human rights abuses.

In 2017 alone, the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted about 20,000 people off its coast. These people were then brought back to Libya, where they faced unthinkable abuses.

And if it weren’t for humanitarian organizations like Migrants of the Mediterranean, there would be virtually no checks on the outright abuses migrants have to endure.

Nor any pressure on the European Union to call out Operation Sophia for what it really is: a failure of European communitarian immigration policy.

Endless reports have shed light on the desperate conditions people face on Libyan soil. What are being called refugee relocation camps are actually illegal detention centers where people are abused and forgotten. Reports of death, torture, and violence of all kind have become all too common.

At what cost has the EU halted the recent migration wave?

Ask Sami, who is in detention now at Al-Khums for more than 1 year.

Ask Richard, who was tortured daily for months in Libyan detention.

Ask Fabulous, who spent 4 months at a detention camp in Sabratha.

Like thousands of other people, Sami, Richard, Fabulous––and many more MotM tracks––have been or are right now held in long-term, arbitrary detention within a country that never ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees and does not have its own laws regulating asylum seekers’ safety.

Libya is NOT a safe harbor and the European Union must not rely on its government to detain thousands of people merely to avoid a European landing and reception.

Last week, Italy, Germany, France, and Malta’s Ministers of the Interior met to form a new redistribution plan known as the ‘Predictive Temporary Allocation Programme.’ This is a first step towards what we hope will lead to a rewriting of the Dublin Pact, a fallacious redistribution system that in part explains the Union’s failure to respond to the humanitarian crisis.

And while this certainly is a step in the right direction, the European Union and its Member States have a long way to go to finally acknowledge that every migrant has a right to a safe harbor and that there is an urgent need for a continent-wide immigration policy reform that replaces the Dublin Pact.

We hope the incoming European Commission will fully take on the political necessity to find a lasting and humane solution to Europe's humanitarian crisis. To give honor to those who tragically died on October 3, 2013, and to the thousands of others who have perished at sea just this year in 2019.

Until then, MotM will be on the front line, giving a voice to those that have lost everything to reach Europe. To elevate the migration discourse squarely in human terms.