by Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analysis

24 October 2019

On 3 November 2019, the Italian government will be called upon to extend or cancel its ongoing agreements with the Libyan government that fund and support the country’s Coast Guard and detention centers.

At Migrants of the Mediterranean, we are thinking of the human toll of this agreement.

Ships, training, and financial support for the Libyan Coast Guard have been financed by Italy and other European governments for years. EU financing goes additionally to detention camps, structures built to contain migrants saved at sea by this puppet Coast Guard, but that in reality are not a place of safety but danger.

These Libyan detention centers have been and remain at the center of criticism by human rights organizations like Migrants of the Mediterranean for their outright illegal status.

The centers do not conform with any human rights convention. Migrants are imprisoned for years, often tortured, sold as slaves, exploited, and left to die. Alone. In a country they never wanted to set foot in.  

The agreements directly stem from what we’ve heard so often in Europe’s anti-migrants narrative: “help them at home.”

And yet these agreements not only fail to help people in their home states–– since most are not from Libya––but have also physically blocked migrants in a volatile country, where they are treated like slaves and are under constant threat of physical danger. This project has failed, but few in Italy and Europe are speaking against it.

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

What is the human cost of furthering this agreement?

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 actively tracks––have been or are right now held in long-term, arbitrary detention within a country that never ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees.

So when Italy’s Prime Minister says they are “evaluating whether or not to extend the agreements,” it should read as a failure of the country’s migratory policies, for there is no virtue to evaluate when it comes to criminal inhumanity.

If nothing is done on November 3rd these agreements will be automatically renewed until 2022––another three years of torture, of complicit silence, and funding that fuels a broken Libyan system.

The North African country has no laws regulating asylum seekers' safety, meaning refugees in Libya are received as flat-out criminals.

The Italian government has a few weeks left to change course.

To put humanity before politics.

Until then, we will be on the front line, calling out the political shortcomings, as we did in Foggia, reporting the inhuman conditions of Gran Ghetto.

Migrants of the Mediterranean is dedicated to giving a face and a voice to those on the margins, to elevate the migration discourse squarely in human terms.