The Libyan Deal

Thousands of African migrants trying to get to Europe end up trapped in Libya. Often they endure abuse, and some are sold into slavery.  At last week's summit of European Union and African leaders in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a top African Union official said there could be as many as 700,000 Africans stranded in Libya.

The summit concluded with a plan to evacuate refugees stranded in Libya.

 "Amnesty International has been documenting the situation of migrants and refugees in Libya for years," said Franziska Vilmar, who works on asylum law and policy at the German branch of Amnesty International. She accuses the European Union of having turned a blind eye to events in Libya for a long time and not having done anything to alleviate the disastrous conditions for people living in the camps. "For months now, the EU has been training and funding the Libyan coast guard, whose involvement in human trafficking is murky," Vilmar said. "The Libyan coast guard rescues people in distress and takes them back to the camps where they face the threat of torture, rape and abuse." The medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders has also criticized the leaders of EU countries for this.

Vilmar does not believe that the plan put forth by the African Union and the EU can be implemented in its current form.  "I think it is unrealistic because the government neither runs all the camps nor does it have influence over them." Many such facilities are in the hands of militias: "That means it is practically impossible to get everyone out of there."

Cecile Pouilly, the spokesperson for the refugee agency of the United Nations, confirmed that. "There are camps to which we have no access because they are in the hands of criminal groups."

In Vilmar's view, the European Union is avoiding responsibility for its own policies by cooperating with countries such as Libya that do not offer adequate protection or applications for asylum to displaced people. By closing Europe's borders, Vilmar said, the EU is forcing displaced people to seek other routes to the bloc, with increasingly cruel consequences. "In Libya, the cooperation between the coast guard and human traffickers is a blooming business that will do even better when the European Union isolates itself," Vilmar said. "I don't think the evacuations will change that."

Joseph Teye, a migration expert at the University of Ghana's Center for Migration Studies, said the reasons behind young people's desire to make the illegal sea journey were numerous and complex.
"The root causes are many — the poverty, misconception, policy and institutional problems… and also the strict visa regimes of developed countries are among some of the causes," he said, adding that developed countries could help by "opening their doors more to regulated migration. Migration is not bad. We see it as something good, but it has to be managed," he said.

"When you work more and earn less, sometimes you suffocate," one migrant, Yunis Sola, said. "You feel like moving because if… I can work for one hour somewhere else and get more dollars, that perception will push me to go out there,"