|
A European Commission technical mission recently analysed the situation of Libya’s refugee policy: it doesn’t exist. By MATTHEW VELLA
Libya’s estimated 5.5 million population is home to 660,000 legal foreign workers and a potential number of anything between 750,000 and 1,200,000 illegal immigrants, with between 75,000 and 100,000 illegal entries on a yearly basis – they come through Libya’s massive 4,400km land border, and they leave through its extensive 1,770km coastline. But nothing is certain in Libya, where statistical data is not a relevance.
Until very recently, Libya’s need for foreign labour meant it actually encouraged immigration from neighbouring African and Arab states. Libya allows entry without a visa to all Arab states, except Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. A visa regime is in force for nationals of other countries.
Following years of adopting an open door policy, Libya now perceives illegal immigration as a “growing threat with the dimension of a national crisis”, whilst the EU remains concerned about the pressure on its borders coming from Libya.
The number of migrants leaving Libya to Europe pales in comparison to the actual population of migrants living there: in 2003, Italy reported 14,017 migrant arrivals from Libya and 12,737 in 2004. Malta recorded 1,369 boat arrivals in the first ten months of 2004. Almost 2,000 would-be migrants are recorded as having perished at sea.
Libya in fact lacks an actual refugee policy, which renders questionable the repatriation of non-Libyans from Europe into the country, for fear they might be repatriated back to their homes when there is no guarantee of protection: there is no procedure for granting refugee status in Libya whilst the UNHCR office in Tripoli has no official status from the authorities.
It also is not a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, although there are provisions on this convention and the forbidding of the repatriation of recognised refugees exists in the constitution and the Organisation of African Unity’s Convention on the issue, which Libya has ratified.
However, in 2005 around 54,000 illegal immigrants were repatriated by Libya, 5,688 of which were deported using a charter flight programme funded by Italy, their return apparently decided without a detailed examination at an individual level.
According to the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), over the past years Libya has undertaken massive repatriation of its migrant population, whilst hundreds of African migrant workers have been subject to racial violence and killings stemming from an anti-black sentiment of the population. Several reports exist of asylum seekers repatriated to countries where they face torture and ill-treatment, in violation of the principle of non-refoulement. Even the Libyan League for Human Rights, a member of the FIDH, has to operate in exile.
According to a technical mission to Libya from a panel of 14 experts from the European Commission, although the country acknowledges its immigration problems, mainly related to economic migration and the effects this brings on labour prices, Libya still does not appear to accept the overall argument for a global approach to combating migration.
The clash of visions is nowhere more apparent from what is described by the technical mission in its April 2005 report as their reluctance to accept that illegal immigration networks are in fact organised crime syndicates luring migrants to travel across the sea – the Libyan authorities state that “there are simply no international criminal organisations that organise illegal immigration for sub-Saharan Africans.”
No distinction is made between asylum seekers – those actively seeking state protection – and economic migrants, apparently out of concern the latter might present claims for international protection which would results in processing a large number of unfounded applications.
Conditions in detention camps have also been described as varying “greatly, from relatively acceptable to extremely poor”.
Libya operates four types of detention camps, catering for short stays, long-term detention, open centres and repatriation centres. The European Commission’s technical mission’s report claimed the Sulman short-term centre was housing 200 migrants in an isolated barn-like structure and sat on the ground. Hygiene was “at a minimum”, with an absence of kitchens, places to eat and places to sleep in beds.
Long-term detention centres were assimilated to prisons, one of which was composed of rooms with a capacity of 200, with no divisions according to sex, age, race or other characteristics. At the Misratah centre, the director told the mission that detainees could wash and eat well in the centre, although detainees claimed food was limited to bread and water, and that they had washed the centre the day before the mission’s visit.
Curiously, the open camps are actually rented to African communities, according to nationalities, where they set up their own facilities and businesses and from where they travel to nearby cities to find work. The mission described the camps as giving “the distinct impression of a ghetto-like atmosphere, a way for the authorities to keep undesirable foreigners away from the Libyan citizens”.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
|
