human rights violations within the UN report | EUROtoday

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Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Libya are victims of “systematic violations and abuses” of human rights, together with homicide, torture, sexual violence and human trafficking. This is the conclusion drawn by a report by the United Nations Office for Human Rights and the UN Support Mission in Libya. The report highlights that migrants are “rounded up and kidnapped by criminal networks of traffickers, often linked to the Libyan authorities and criminal networks abroad”, describing their practices.

First the “separation from their families” happens, then the switch to detention facilities with strategies that represent types of arbitrary detention. Once imprisoned, migrants are “regularly subjected to terrible violations and abuses, including slavery, torture, ill-treatment, forced labor, forced prostitution and other forms of sexual violence, ransom demands, extortion”, in addition to the “confiscation and resale of their personal belongings and identity documents”.

The “normalization” of abuse

The survey was drawn up with interviews with round 100 migrants, asylum seekers and refugees arriving from 16 international locations in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In the interval underneath the lens of the investigation, between January 2024 and December 2025, the connection between the emergence of a «mannequin of exploitation that preys on migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in conditions of larger vulnerability which has turn into enterprise as regular: a brutal and normalized actuality.”

Libya, 7.5 million inhabitants on an area almost six times the size of Italy, has transformed itself for over a decade into a crucial transit hub for migration towards Europe. The country is today split between the so-called government of national unity of Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibeh and an east under the authority of the government of national stability of Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. The international community recognizes Dbeibah, although dialogue is maintained with both sides.

The Italian Ministry of the Interior recorded a complete of 58,408 arrivals from Libya out of simply over 66 thousand registered general in 2025, the equal of a leap of over 38% in comparison with 2024 and a share of virtually 90% of the whole landings within the 12 months underneath the lens of the Interior Ministry. Italy and the EU have signed agreements and supplied funding to the Libyan Coast Guard, with an estimate reported by Sun 24 Hours of round half a billion euros in EU funding over a decade.