Over the past four months, the Tripoli-based Internal Security Agency (ISA), has launched a vast repressive campaign under the pretext of protecting “Libyan and Islamic values”.
Many youths have paid the price, forced to “confess” on video that they have propagated the “contempt for Islam.” As well as have contact with international organizations, including Amnesty International.
Those arrested were initially held in ISA headquarters, and then transferred to Jdaida and Mitiga prisons. The latter is run by the state-backed militia called “Deterrence Apparatus to Fight Organized Crime and Terrorism”, (RADA) known to carry out murders, disappearances, and torture with complete impunity.
The first “confessions” on video began to circulate in December: seven of the arrested declared, in an evident state of coercion and without lawyers present, that they “were in contact with atheists, agnostics, secularists, feminists, lesbians, and gays.”
The ISA accompanied the “confessions” with press releases, in which it claimed that it was fighting against “immoral” behaviour, that is against “Libyan and Islamic values and seek to spread atheism, entice young people to travel abroad, and promote unorthodox sexual practices in the name of freedom.”
Many of the people named in the “confessions” were forced into hiding after receiving death threats or being accused, via social media, of “damaging the morality of Libya”.
In other press releases, the Agency warned of the “immoral” influence exercised by international organizations, accused of wanting to exploit Libyan youth by spreading “false ideals”.
On 13 March, following threats received by the ISA, the Tanweer Movement, which fights for the rights of women and LGBTI people, announced its closure.