Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières – MSF) has issued a stark condemnation of the dire conditions faced by migrants in Libyan detention centers, particularly highlighting the facilities in Abu Salim and Ain Zara, Tripoli.
In a recent statement, the organization detailed the egregious human rights violations endured by refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in these centers. This includes sexual abuse, physical violence, and even murder, compounded by systematic denial of basic human necessities such as food, clean water, sanitation, and medical care.
MSF’s call for immediate action includes urging an end to the forced detention of irregular migrants in Libya, and the release of all individuals from such centers nationwide. They emphasize the need for providing these migrants and refugees with protection and safe haven, as well as establishing legal avenues for their departure from Libya.
The report documents the living conditions and the range of abuses migrants endure in Abu Salim and Ain Zara, throughout 2023. Thousands, including vulnerable women and children, are forcibly confined in inhumane conditions.
MSF Libya Head, Federica Franco expressed profound alarm at the situation. She described the daily stripping of human dignity, and the infliction of cruel and degrading treatment. In Abu Salim, exclusively holding women and children, detainees reported sexual violence, strip searches, beatings, and assaults by guards and armed outsiders. One detainee shared a harrowing account of physical and sexual abuse, followed by threats and further violence.
At Ain Zara, male detainees described forced labor, exploitation, and other human rights abuses. They reported several deaths, due to violence and lack of medical care. MSF’s medical teams recorded 71 instances of violence in the first half of 2023 alone, treating injuries that include bone fractures and serious bruises.
Detainees also described various forms of intimidation and humiliation, like being soaked with sewage, food deprivation as punishment, and enforced days without light. Crowded conditions force hundreds to sleep sitting up, with overflowing sewage and blocked toilets. The lack of adequate food and water, coupled with these dire conditions, has led to the spread of infectious diseases.
Essential relief items such as clothing, mattresses, hygiene kits, blankets, diapers, and baby milk formula were distributed only irregularly and were reportedly regularly confiscated by the guards. In the Abu Salim detention center, MSF teams saw the impact on babies’ skin from makeshift diapers made from towels and plastic bags, and from the prolonged use of diapers. Women said they were forced to use pieces of blanket or torn-up T-shirts, as makeshift tampons and sanitary pads.
On top of the dire living conditions and inhumane treatment, people held in Abu Salim and Ain Zara were regularly denied access to lifesaving medical care and humanitarian assistance. MSF teams were denied access to both detention centers, and to individual cells within the centers, dozens of times.
While in Abu Salim, the teams documented more than 62 incidents of interference in our medical assistance, including breaches of medical confidentiality and the confiscation of essential relief items.
MSF completely lost access to the Ain Zara detention center in early July and to the Abu Salim detention center in August 2023. This loss of access and frequent obstructions to the provision of principled humanitarian assistance were a contributing factor to our decision to end activities in Tripoli.
“After seven years of providing medical and humanitarian assistance in Tripoli, the appalling situation we have witnessed in Libya’s detention centers is a direct reverberation of Europe’s harmful migration policies aimed at preventing people from leaving Libya at all costs and forcefully returning them to a country that is not safe for them,” says Franco.
Notably, MSF’s revelations paint a grim picture of the reality in Libyan migrant detention centers. The report underscores the urgent need for international intervention, to address the inhumane conditions and human rights violations occurring within these facilities. The organization’s plea highlights the critical importance of global attention to this humanitarian crisis, calling for immediate and concerted efforts to alleviate the suffering of migrants and refugees in Libya.