Migrants, Italy halts NGO ships and renews the Memorandum with Libya
Rights — di Simone Santi
Italy resumes blocking NGO vessels carrying migrants at sea and renews the Memorandum with Libya, which violates human rights.
Migrants, Italy halts NGO ships and renews the Memorandum with Libya
Italy resumes blocking NGO vessels carrying migrants at sea and renews the Memorandum with Libya, which violates human rights.
Italy will continue to finance and train the Libyan Coast Guard until at least 2026, with the aim of halting migrant flows in the Mediterranean. On 2 November, the Memorandum with Libya, signed in 2017 by the governments then led by Paolo Gentiloni and Al Serraj, was automatically renewed for a further three years, no requests for revocation having been received. The Memorandum provides for support to the Libyan Coast Guard through funding, equipment and training. Since 2017, the so-called Libyan Coast Guard has received over 100 million in training and equipment (57.2 million from the Africa Trust Fund and 45 million through Italy's dedicated military mission alone).
The problem is that the Libyan Coast Guard, by the United Nations' own admission, has long since become a fully autonomous militia, made up of human traffickers, that escapes the control of the Tripoli government and fails to guarantee even the minimum standards of respect for migrants' human rights. Despite this, for 2021 too the Italian Parliament confirmed the allocations provided for by the Memorandum with Libya and, under the new government, resumed blocking NGO vessels carrying hundreds of migrants at sea.
The context of 2017 and that of today
When the agreement was drawn up in 2017, the Italian government, under pressure from a sharp increase in arrivals, intended to entrust the management of reception camps in Libya — the country through which migrants from across Africa pass in an attempt to make the crossing to Italy — to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Unhcr) and the International Organisation for Migration (Iom). It also aimed to strengthen the patrolling of coastlines directly in Libyan waters, as a deterrent to departures.
This afternoon, 174 asylum seekers were evacuated from Libya to #Niger with the help of the Emergency Transit Mechanism #ETM & welcomed by the @UNHCRNiger team at the airport.
Nearly 4,000 persons have been evacuated from Libya to Niger since the start of the #ETM in Nov 2017.
Nearly 4,000 persons have been evacuated from Libya to Niger since the start of the #ETM in Nov 2017.
In the meantime, however, the political conditions in Libya have changed decisively, and for the worse: in 2017, President Fayez Al Serraj headed a government of national unity that had been formed little more than a year earlier and appeared capable of controlling a good portion of Libya's vast territory, despite the presence of numerous tribes and local governments.
For years now, instead, the country has been gripped by a civil war with the militias of General Haftar, who control much of the territory outside Tripoli, which severely limits the power of the official government, which is effectively able to control only the capital, Tripoli. So much so that the local authorities themselves ended up declaring Libya an "unsafe port". In 2020, Italy had requested certain changes to the memorandum, such as strengthening the presence of United Nations observers inside detention centres — a condition that has never materialised.
I cambiamenti richiesti da Roma a Tripoli sul #memorandum riguardano la presenza dell’Onu nei centri di detenzione in #Libia, ma l’Unhcr non è stata nemmeno coinvolta nella stesura degli emendamenti che appaiono irrisori date le condizioni nel paese.
intern.az/1BxI
intern.az/1BxI
What the Memorandum provides for
Officially, the memorandum stipulates that the Italian side commits to providing technical and technological support to the Libyan bodies responsible for combating irregular immigration: the Border Guard and Coast Guard of the Ministry of Defence and the competent bodies and departments of the Ministry of the Interior. The parties commit to the upgrading and financing of already active reception centres, drawing on funding available from the Italian side and from the European Union.
The Italian side also contributes, through the supply of medicines and medical equipment for reception health centres, to meeting the healthcare needs of irregular migrants, for the treatment of serious communicable and chronic diseases. Furthermore, Italy commits to supporting the training of Libyan personnel inside the aforementioned reception centres to address the conditions of illegal migrants, supporting Libyan research centres operating in this field so that they contribute to identifying the most appropriate methods for tackling the phenomenon of irregular immigration and human trafficking.
The problem is that the United Nations themselves, through a fact-finding mission established in 2020 by the Human Rights Council, found that through the funding received from Italy, crimes against humanity are being perpetrated in Libya, based on the testimonies of dozens "of migrants subjected to systematic human rights violations": these include murders, kidnappings with ransom demands made to family members (especially in the case of Eritrean migrants, who are better off and are fleeing essentially to escape permanent military service) or for the purpose of enslavement (for all the others, forced into hard labour until they have raised enough money to pay their own ransom), as well as rape, detention in degrading conditions in Libyan prisons for the sole fact of being undocumented, and deprivation of all possessions.
Those drifting ships full of people
@EuroMedRights and Italian member @ArciNazionale in Roma to ask the Italian government not to renew the #Italy/#Libya agreement which led to 100,000 pushbacks since 2017 #openlegalpathways
For this reason, in recent weeks as many as 40 civil society organisations, including Arci, Amnesty International, A Buon diritto, Baobab Experience, Emergency, Fondazione Migrantes, Cgil-Cisl-Uil, Save the Children, Medici senza Frontiere, Oxfam, loudly and unsuccessfully called on Italy to rescind the agreements, which are tacitly renewed on 2 February 2023 in the absence of three months' notice. Among them were also some of the so-called sea NGOs such as Mediterranea Sea Watch, Alarm Phone, Open Arms. As further proof that the Italy-Libya agreements do not prevent departures but simply increase the already enormous suffering of those fleeing, three ships (Geo Barents of Msf, Humanity 1 of Humanity Sos, and Ocean Viking) are at this very moment stranded in the Mediterranean with a total of nearly 900 migrants on board, unable to find a port at which to disembark after being turned away by Italy and Malta. And yet, as Filippo Miraglia, vice-president and head of immigration at Arci, explains, "the courts have ruled in favour of the NGOs every single time, because they are simply complying with an international obligation." Meanwhile, in Lampedusa, Sicily, and along the Calabrian coast, favoured by fair weather, in recent days autonomous landings of small vessels have followed one after another, with hundreds of people on board arriving at the island.
ORA A BORDO DELLA #GEOBARENTS
“Ci sono bambini, donne incinte, minori non accompagnati. Da una settimana, sono ostaggio di politiche disumane. C’è chi ha subito violenze e abusi in Libia. HANNO BISOGNO DI SBARCARE IN UN PORTO SICURO ADESSO!” @Candi_Lo #MSF #GeoBarents
“Ci sono bambini, donne incinte, minori non accompagnati. Da una settimana, sono ostaggio di politiche disumane. C’è chi ha subito violenze e abusi in Libia. HANNO BISOGNO DI SBARCARE IN UN PORTO SICURO ADESSO!” @Candi_Lo #MSF #GeoBarents
All of this despite the fact that since 2017, according to figures provided by the network of associations that sought to oppose the automatic renewal, nearly 100,000 people have been intercepted at sea by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and forcibly returned to Libya, a country that cannot be considered safe. "The lives of migrants and refugees in Libya are constantly at risk, amid arbitrary detention, abuse, violence and exploitation. It means having no rights and no protection whatsoever.
Italy and the European Union continue to deploy ever greater public resources in Libya and to regard it as a country with which agreements can be struck, within a complex system based on border externalisation policies, which delegates the management of migratory flows to countries of origin and transit, with the financial support and collaboration of the European Union and its member states — the 40 organisations explain in a joint statement —. The Italy-Libya Memorandum creates the conditions for the violation of the rights of migrants and refugees by indirectly facilitating practices of exploitation and torture carried out in a systematic manner and of a kind that constitute crimes against humanity."
The new government's "pact for Africa"
In her policy address to Parliament, premier Giorgia Meloni spoke of a pact for Africa to curb migration through bilateral agreements with countries of origin, though at the risk of running into new Libya-style cases: for Arci vice-pres