Socialist Standard No. 1379 July 2019

July 2019 PDF  (117MB)
July 2019 (Compressed 5.6 MB) with some typos)

• Editorial: Chairing UK plc
  
• Pathfinders: The Parthian Torpedo
  
• Freedom of Movement: Another Euromyth
  
• Snorts of derision
  
• Cooking the Books I: For the few not the many
  
• Wood for the Trees: Political Aesthetics
  
• Material World: Colour Prejudice
  
• Homelessness: A 21st Century Scandal
  
• Huawei: Is it really just cybersecurity?
  
• Redundancy: Sacking the system
  
• Summer School 2019
• Cooking the Books II: Monbiot sees the light
• Socialism and Planning: What Can Work
  
• Proper Gander
  
• Reviews
  
• 50 Years Ago: Scotch Mist
  
• Meetings: July
  
• Rear View
  
• Free Lunch
  

Who are the English?

The number of people who believe that in order to be English you have to be white has halved over the past seven years, with the older generation apparently driving a wider acceptance of people with different ethnic backgrounds. The survey showed that three factors – being born in England, paying taxes in England and contributing to English society – were seen as important in being English by more than 70% of the population.

Just over 10% of people believe that ethnicity is an important determining factor in being English, compared to 20% from a 2012 study, according to British Future and the Centre for English Identity and Politics,

The biggest change was noted among over-65s, where the importance of whiteness fell from 35% to 16%. 

Previous results showed 56% of participants thought it was important for your parents to have been born in England, and the latest show 48% do – marking a drop of 8%. “There has been an important generational shift in how we think about England and the English,” said Katwala. “There has been no doubt that most people who have migrated to England, like my parents, usually felt they were invited to become British but not often to identify as English, too. An increasing number of their children, born in England, have felt they can choose to identify as English as well as British.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/30/being-english-not-about-colour-say-majority

The Right-wing Extremist Republican Party

Joe Lowndes, a political scientist at the University of Oregon who researches rightwing politics, said: “If the Oregon Republican party were a European political party it would be an authoritarian far-right party...[Republicans] were essentially gloating about having an armed wing of the party."

 He says that climate crisis politics represents a “sweet spot” for Republicans in Oregon. “There’s a distinct way that Republicans can use rightwing populism around that issue, bringing in farmers and loggers while you’re doing the work of wealthy interests,” Lowndes said.

Republican senators were responding to an incremental, market-based, cap-and-trade plan aimed at curbing climate crisis. But, when faced with the climate bill, Republicans pulled their senators out of the state and sent them to Idaho, to deny the state Senate a quorum. Earlier in the session, they did the same thing when faced with a bill raising taxes for education, and Democrats broke the deadlock by abandoning bills intended to limit exemptions to vaccination and introduce gun control measures. Having killed the climate crisis bill, the Republican senators said they would return to their jobs on Saturday. “Our mission was to kill cap-and-trade,” said senator Herman Baertschiger “And that’s what we did.”

As police were ordered to bring them home, right-wing militia groups vowed to defend them, raising the prospect of violent confrontation.  Senator Brian Boquist – a former special forces officer and the owner of a business that reportedly deployed “paramilitary force” in overseas conflicts – hinted he would violently resist arrest.

The situation has led some to warn that conservatives elsewhere in the US may be similarly obstructive in the difficult but urgent efforts to address the climate crisis and may seek to adopt similar tactics. Several armed right-wing groups said they would defend them. On Thursday, a convoy of logging trucks blocked the streets of the state capital, Salem, while hundreds of protesters – some sporting the insignia of patriot movement groups – demonstrated outside the state house against the climate crisis bill, despite the fact it was no longer even on the table. Rightwing patriot movement groups have, along with many Republicans, long expressed disbelief in human-induced global heating, and have sometimes embraced conspiracy-minded beliefs about environmental measures such as the “Agenda 21” conspiracy theory – which holds that there is a UN-driven plot to undermine US sovereignty, and exert “full spectrum dominance” over a submissive population

Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center, a progressive nonprofit explained, “It should be a warning and a wake up call to the rest of the nation that, even when a governance system exists, even if you have a supermajority, that democratic practice itself is still vulnerable to being undermined, and that’s what we’re seeing.” Citing the presence of often-armed patriot movement groups, and the unwillingness of Republicans to draw “a clear moral line” around such groups, Ward said: “If we were in Afghanistan, if we were in Iraq, if we were in Sudan, if we were in the former Yugoslavia, and this was taking place, we would call it a political crisis, and we would call it a threat to democratic practice.”

Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas, co-wrote an article on the practice of “constitutional hardball” whereby such groups take extreme actions to violate previously existing norms.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/28/how-republican-senators-killed-oregons-climate-crisis-bill

Taking stewardship of the planet

The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) was held in Germany to rally behind a new approach to achieving a future that is more inclusive and sustainable than the present – through the establishment of secure and proper rights for all. On Jun. 22 and 23, experts, political leaders, NGOs and indigenous peoples and communities gathered to deliberate on rights for indigenous peoples and local communities in the management and perseveration of landscapes. The forum took place alongside the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Bonn Climate Change Conference.

According to the United Nations, the land belonging to the 350 million indigenous peoples across the globe is one of the most powerful shields against climate change as it holds 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity and sequesters nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon. 

In the climate and development arenas, the most current alarm being sounded is for rights–securing the land rights and freedoms of indigenous peoples, local communities and the marginalised members therein. 

How can these custodians of a quarter of the world’s terrestrial surface be expected to care for their traditional lands if the lands don’t, in fact, belong to them? Or, worse, if they’re criminalised and endangered for doing so?

Indigenous peoples, local communities, women and youth, are believed to be the world’s most important environmental stewards but they are also among the most threatened and criminalised groups with little access to rights. It is for this reason that amid the urgency to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under pressure from the climate threat, dialogues about the global future have begun to wake up to the fact that indigenous peoples’ relationships with the natural world are not only crucial to preserve for their own sakes, but for everyone’s. The examples of intimidation, criminalisation, eviction and hardship shared throughout the first day clearly showcased what indigenous peoples and local communities go through to preserve the forests or ‘lungs of the earth’.

“We’re defending the world, for every single one of us,” said Geovaldis Gonzalez Jimenez, an indigenous peasant leader from Colombia. But industries such as fossil fuels, large-scale agriculture, mining and others are not only endangering landscapes but also the lives of the people therein. Already this year, said Gonzalez, his region witnessed 135 murders, adding that the day before the start of the GLF a local leader was killed in front of a 9-year-old boy.

Diel Mochire Mwenge, who leads the Initiative Programme for the Development of the Pygme in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the largest indigenous forest communities in Central Africa, said he has witnessed more than one million people being evicted from the national parkland where they have long lived. He explained that they had not been given benefits from the ecotourism industries brought in to replace them and were left struggling to find new income sources.

“Our identity is being threatened, and we need to avoid being completely eradicated,” said Mwenge.

In Jharkhand, India, activist Gladson Dungdung, whose parents were murdered in 1990 for attending a court case over a local land dispute, said an amendment to India’s Forest Rights Act currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court could see 7.5 million indigenous peoples evicted from their native forest landscapes. The act can impact a further 90 million people who depend on these forests’ resources for their survival, he said. The amendment, Dungdung said, would also give absolute power to the national forest guard; if a guard were to see someone using the forest for hunting or timber collection, they could legally shoot the person on-sight.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Vicky Tauli-Corpuz said lands managed by indigenous peoples with secure rights have lower deforestation rates, higher biodiversity levels and higher carbon storage than lands in government-protected areas.

Gerrymandering free-for-all

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that federal judges have no power to police partisan gerrymandering - the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries for political gain - likely will embolden politicians to pursue more extreme efforts free from the fear of judicial interference, experts said. 

“We’ll see more states doing more bad stuff,” said University of California at Irvine election law expert Rick Hasen. 

Election reformers now face a limited menu of options, all of which face potential obstacles: voter ballot initiatives, lawsuits filed in state courts and congressional legislation. Countering gerrymandering will fall back to state legislatures, courts and voters themselves.

“The hope from the reform groups was that you would just be able to wave a wand over the entire country and fix all the gerrymanders,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida expert on U.S. elections. “[Chief Justice] Roberts said the battle that was in the states will stay in the states.”

Gerrymandering is carried out by configuring districts in a way that packs as many like-minded voters as possible into a small number of districts and distributing the rest in other districts too thinly to form a majority. Trump’s fellow Republicans have been the primary beneficiaries of gerrymandering since the last round of redistricting following the 2010 census, though Democrats have engaged in the practice as well. Hasen said he expects more Democratic-led legislatures to engage in the practice in light of the ruling. 

“I think there will be a lot of pressure on Democrats who may have held back to do so, because this has national implications,” Hasen said. 

Return to Sender

 69 containers full of garbage have returned to Canada 

A Philippine court had ordered them returned after it emerged that the garbage had been mislabeled as recyclable plastics before it left Canada in 2013 and 2014.

In May, Malaysia demanded that the United States, Japan, France, Canada, Australia and Britain take back 3,000 tons of garbage.

The problem emerged after China stopped accepting waste last year, leading many other countries to redirected their rubbish.

Fact of the Day

One hundred and forty million poor and low-income people in America are a $400 emergency away from not being able to pay their bills next month.

 That’s 43.5% of the population in the world’s richest nation.

Strawberry Slaves

The upcoming Wimbledon tennis tournament is famous for its strawberries.The Observer reveals the working conditions of some who pick these strawberries. Spain is the biggest exporter of strawberries to Europe. The fruit has become so valuable to the national economy that it has been dubbed Spain’s “red gold”. The UK is Spain’s third biggest export market for strawberries.

Moroccan women say they have faced exploitation and abuse. International human rights lawyers warn the allegations could amount to “state-sponsored human trafficking” between Morocco and Spain. They claim they were deliberately deceived when they were recruited by the Ministry for Employment in Morocco in February. They say they were promised good housing, free food and a decent wage if they worked for three months. The women also claim they each paid about €700 for their visa, transport to Spain and protective clothing, such as boots and gloves.

When they arrived, they say they were forced to live in unsanitary and inhumane housing with no access to clean drinking water. They claim they were not paid for their labour, threatened and racially abused and saw other women being sexually assaulted. When they complained, they said they were threatened with being sent back to Morocco with no pay.

“...when we got to Spain they made us feel like animals,” said one woman. “The farm owner only knew one phrase in Arabic, which was: 'Work, bitch, or you’ll be sent back to Morocco.'” She says they were told if they didn’t pick enough fruit they couldn’t take a break or go to the toilet. “I worked for three weeks but only got paid for a few days,” she says. “I’m not a slave or a prostitute. I want to go home but I can’t go back without my wages.”

“I worked for weeks but didn’t get paid. When [myself and other women] complained and asked for our money, buses arrived at the accommodation and women were made to get on and they were sent away,” said another woman who reported her claims to the police. “I’m so scared of going home because I took out a bank loan to pay for my visa and I have no way of paying it back without my wages. I thought coming here would let me help my children but instead they are going hungry at home.”

“Multiple women have now come forward but so far the Spanish legal system has failed to sufficiently investigate their claims,” says Almudena Bernabeu, an international human rights lawyer at Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers in London and Madrid. “It appears as if there are insufficient measures in place to ensure that the working and living conditions of Moroccan women working in Spain are what was promised. The situation currently is weighed almost entirely in favour of the landowners and corporations profiting from their labour. The allegations being made amount to state-sponsored human trafficking and they must be properly dealt with.”

Lawyers and human rights activists say that the Spanish legal system has no interest in the claims.

Women’s Link Worldwide, an international NGO operating in Spain and providing legal services for migrant women, is representing another four women trying to get their claims of abuse accepted by the courts. “The criminal courts recently threw out the charges we have filed because they said that the conditions described in the women’s witness statements, such as non-payment of wages, 10-hour working days and verbal and physical abuse, did not constitute labour exploitation,” says Hannah Wilson, a lawyer at the organisation.

“These women are faced with a choice of staying and fighting a system that is weighed against them or returning home and trying to see their children again,” says Belen Saez, who is now representing 14 women claiming they faced abuse while working in Spain. “If they are not given access to justice nothing will change. These women are being ignored because of their gender, their race and their economic status. All we are asking is that the workers are paid properly and treated humanely.”

Winning the Battle of Ideas

French police pepper-sprayed XR climate campaigners involved in a sit-down protest endeavouring to block a bridge over the River Seine.

"We need to civilly disrupt because, otherwise, nothing is going to be done." said a female who took part in the protest

The meteorological agency said that temperature in parts of France topped 45° C (113° F), the highest on record.

The retreat of mountain glaciers, the shrinking of polar ice sheets and the fluctuations of El Nino events, has dire consequences for huge swathes of humanity. Many scientists believe we have reached tipping points and feedbacks that will lead to runaway uncontrollable global warming. Each new research paper indicate climate change is accelerating faster than previous estimates. The speed of the change is already effecting humanity and eco-systems, costing lives and causing species extinction on an unprecedented scale. This reality is radicalising a whole section of society who are coming to conclusions that the system is no longer equipped to slow down much less stop climate change. Yet the same people look to the capitalist market for a solution and hope that our rulers might listen. 

Leading eco-activists continue to believe that the free-market is the only force capable of reducing CO2 emissions to the levels needed, in the time needed, to stave off disaster. Gambling with all of our futures, their best bet the planet is the hope that some scheme might be devised that could make profits so to incentify the corporations. All the solutions on offer will not save the planet. The Socialist Party considers this as a form of climate denial. Socialists must galvanise the many climate justice movements so to leave no room for ambiguity about what it necessary within our lifetimes to avoid global climate catastrophe. .

Capitalism has simply proven incapable of stopping or limiting the damage climate change is inflicting upon the world's peoples. Capitalism could survive a switch from fossil fuels to reneawable forms of energy but the stumbling block to such shifts are profits, competition and the need for each company to expand and accumulate capital. Capitalism is driven by a short-term hunger for profits. Investment decisions are made on the basis on what will make a return in the least waiting time. Such a system cannot deal with the scale of the climate crisis or make rational planned decisions about what to produce that is separate from the bottom line of profits. This is the intrinsic logic of capitalism. This is the reason that capitalism has visited destruction upon the planet. 

The Socialist Party is well aware of this and of the system’s rapacious nature. The Socialist Party knows that capitalism is the cause of climate change and socialism i.e. common ownership and democratic production-for-needs is the cure. Those within the green movement who advocate life-style changes to reduce consumerism and consumption miss the point. It is not about consuming less for most of the planets inhabitants or even for those of us in the “affluent” developed countries. It is about stopping capitalism from consuming the planet. The Socialist Party offers the only chance to ensure the survival of humanity in the face of what may be greatest threat it has ever faced.

West London Branch Meeting

Tues, July 2, 8:00 pm 
Committee Room, 
Chiswick Town Hall, 
Heathfield Terrace,
 London W4 4JN

The land the workers work upon, the machinery they use, and the articles they make do not belong to the workers, but belong to the employers who pay the wages. The difference between the value of the wealth the workers produce and the value of the wages they receive back in payment for their work represents a surplus of wealth which enables the employers, who take it, to live without working.

The Socialist Party is a political party of working men and women organised together for the purpose of getting control of political power in order to introduce socialism. Its Parliamentary candidates are selected as fitting tools for the job. Its members control the party throughout and determine, by majority decisions, the policy of the organisation. This policy is set forth in all the literature the party publishes. The party is, controlled entirely by its members and is not at the beck and call of either a place-hunting individual or a group of self-seekers. A party claiming to be socialist, but with a list of reforms or “immediate demands,” attracts reformers who are not socialists, and has a reformist and not a socialist electorate behind it. Even if such a party obtains political control it is useless for the purpose of furthering socialism. While the Socialist Party is opposed to a reformist policy the socialist delegate in Parliament or on a local council is not, therefore, bound to vote against every particular measure. The Socialist Party does not hold that the measures already taken or to be taken by the capitalists are all of them bound to be useless or harmful to the workers, or bound to impede progress towards socialism.

The Socialist Party holds that some of the measures brought forward by the capitalists owing to economic developments or owing to conflicts of interest between sections of the capitalists themselves can be used as weapons in the class struggle by the workers and by the socialist movement. That being the case, a socialist minority in Parliament or on a local council would be required by the socialists who sent them there to criticise from the socialist standpoint all measures brought before them (pointing out their futility in comparison with socialism and so forth), and to refrain from supporting, bargaining or allying themselves with any party for temporary ends, but at the same time would be required to vote for particular measures where there is a clear gain to the workers and the socialist movement in so doing. It may be added that such measures are more likely to be put forward when Socialism is imminent, and a frightened ruling class is striving to keep back the flood by making concessions.

We must emphasise that the object of the Socialist Party is the establishment of socialism. This purpose, in an organisation based solely upon the demand for socialism, and putting forward candidates on that and nothing else, cannot be forgotten or submerged. Our policy, our organisation, and all our activities are governed by that objective. The question of voting for or against, or ignoring measures introduced by non-socialist parties, does not and cannot influence our policy towards the objective.

If you are tired of the chains of slavery, join the party and thereby give us your aid in the work of speeding out of existence the system that oppresses us all.

Is Bernie Sanders really a socialist?

In the latest Democratic Party debate Bernie Sanders talked the talk which we have gorwn accustomed from hearing from him.
“...how come nothing really changes? How come for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class? How come we have the highest rate of childhood poverty? How come 45 million people still have student debt? How come three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?" The answer, Sanders said, is that "nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don't have the guts to take them on, we'll continue to have plans, we'll continue to have talk, and the rich will get richer, and everybody else will be struggling."


But does he really walk the walk?

Americans have permitted themselves to be convinced) that electing a new president will change things. “It's gonna be different this time.” But it won’t be. Even if Bernie Sanders were actually to become President of the United States of America, it would hardly matter, for his freedom of action is too restricting and he would have very little option but to accommodate the capitalist class and their agenda. If he was elected there would be a number of cosmetic changes but the fundamental problem, capitalist property relations, would remain essentially unchanged.

Bernie calls himself a “socialist” and “calls himself” is the key phrase. If “socialism” means that a society’s means of production are social, not privately or state owned — then Sanders is no socialist. Elizabeth Warren advocates very much the same policies as Sanders yet she continues to describe herself as still holding capitalist beliefs. 

But credit where credit is due, even if Bernie doesn’t mean the same as we do when he talks about socialism, he can be at least thanked for at least bringing the term back into vogue, particular in America where it had disappeared from popular discourse since the times Eugene Debs ran for the presidency.

Genuine socialists won’t be jumping on Sanders’ band-wagon anytime soon. Nevertheless, it has been a long time that an aspirant for the presidency of the United States has been talking about “socialism”, no matter how vague his interpretation of it is. To be fair, Sanders also appears to see himself more as a vehicle for re-emergent class politics as his motivation. No such movement, however, is currently on the horizon. If Sanders succeeds in getting the idea of socialism back in peoples’ minds, he may well be sowing the seeds of thought that will someday take hold in a more constructive way and that would be very welcomed even if he really means something else by the word.

Sanders considers the Scandinavian countries as models to emulate, all capitalist, albeit with strong social safety nets, but where the wealthy still enjoy a preponderance of economic and political power. These countries have little in common with the socialism envisaged by Marx and Engels where the working class itself would be in control. What Bernie Sanders means by ‘socialism’ is something more akin to capitalism with a human face. But this is not what socialism is about. The Scandinavian model has managed to achieve certain social welfare objectives, but they never involved fundamental alterations to capitalism’s underlying property relations. Neither would Sanders reforms. Scandinavian reformists thought the benign hand of the state would replace the merciless invisible hand of the market but today the reformers have their hands full just trying to keep hold of what they can from the gains of the past.

The Democratic Party (or as we like to describe them, the Damnocrats) is a party that embraces capitalism. It calls for the reform, not the abolition of capitalism. Sanders routinely supports Democrats when they run for office. He, in other words, is only a reform capitalist candidate. He stands on the other side of the class line dividing the working class from the capitalist class. When socialists speak of working class independent political action, we think in terms of class independence. In other words, a political party entirely under the control of working people, representing their interests and their interest alone.

One basic question rarely raised is who asked Bernie to stand for president? Sanders’ campaign does not rest on any anti-capitalist principle or working-class movement. The Sanders’ campaign is about him getting elected and doing things for working people; he is not encouraging working people to do things for themselves. There was no thought given to constructing a real working-class movement but simply to encourage the unions and working people to remain an appendage to the pro-capitalist Democratic Party. The goal is not to create a socialist society for the working class but to encourage the working class to build socialism for itself. Using the words of Eugene Debs, “If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out.”

Neither Sanders nor any other politician can lead us to the alternative new society we fight for. We must build it for ourselves. America badly needs a vigorous socialist party. America is a plutocracy, which means a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Everything supports that fact. The American working class have been fooled into accepting the concept of common interests wherein the problems of the capitalist class and the state machine are theirs also. The suggestion is that people in the US all belong to one of the world's mightiest military and industrial powers, sharing equally in the glory; so let's all work still harder to increase the arms and wealth of the rulers. The belief that there exists a community of interests from which we all derive common benefits is a mistaken one but nevertheless held strongly. Two crucial political fallacies permeate American workers thinking. First, that the present system can be so organised that it will operate in the interests of the majority, through a process of applied reformism, and second, that “proper leadership” is an essential requirement. However, neither of the foregoing will ever remove any of the major social evils and the socialist mission is to demonstrate that fact. 

Without vibrant grassroots movements changing reality, the richest people in power will keep on trampling upon the working class. We need BOTH activism on the streets demonstrating against specific grievances AND we need effective electoral action for social change. A powerful socialist party should be the conduit for change. Protests have often been aimed at the wrong target. A socialist party is an organisation which can connect the dots between issues and movements -- from winning justice for workers to fighting for immigrant rights to interacting with global social justice movements. We cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which we must battle.

If you’re taken aback by the number of socialist, anti-capitalist and otherwise radical-left parties in the United States and ask why when America is already blessed with a multiplicity of so-called left-wing, socialist parties, why we added another with the World Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS) to increase the confusion? The answer is there is no way of challenging and refuting the confused theories and spurious programs of the parties which promise to reform capitalism except by building up from the ground an organisation of socialists working only for socialism.

http://www.wspus.org/

The Refugee-Migrant Casualities

The harrowing picture of Oscar Alberto Martinez, 25, and his 24-month-old child Angie Valeria spotlighted the plight of the world's 70 million forcibly displaced people.

U.S. Border Patrol reported 283 migrant fatalities on the border in 2018. Activists say the number is higher as the many migrants who die in rugged stretches of wilderness along the 1,950-mile (3,138-km) long border are never found.

The U.N. migration agency said on Friday that at least 32,000 migrants globally, including 1,600 children, have died on dangerous journeys in search of better lives since it began compiling data on migrant deaths and disappearances in 2014.

"Children are dying in all regions of the world." said Frank Laczko, head of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) data analysis centre. "But we've seen relatively little action taken from a humanitarian perspective to help the families who have been affected by these tragedies. Countries obviously prioritise the defence of their borders." Many countries have erected barriers to deter migrants, and the EU and the United States have pressured their neighbours to cut the numbers of people trying to make the journey.

In the mean time, Carola Rackete, the young German captain of a migrant-rescue ship,  Sea Watch, is demonized as a people smuggler and is under threat of arrest by Italian authorities. Italy's deputy prime minister and interior minister calls Rackete a pirate and an outlaw. 

Libya is a hotbed for modern-day slavery. Captured on land, intercepted at sea, cuffed and injured by militias and human traffickers, migrants are sent to detention centers and exposed to every abuse possible. 

Human traffickers and well-armed militias intercept migrants enroute, buying off government officials to sell migrant labor at prices as cheap as a few hundred dollars. The European Union (EU) has invested millions of euros in the Libyan Coast Guard in the name of “efficient border management,” fully aware that those returned can only expect indefinite servitude and abuse.

Oxfam, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and dozens other international organizations condemned the EU’s move, calling the policy “complicit.” The actions of European governments have made it extremely difficult for search and rescue organizations to continue their life-saving work, Oxfam said, calling an end to returning migrants to Libya.

“From the moment migrants step onto Libyan soil, they become vulnerable to unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, unlawful deprivation of liberty and rape,” according to a report by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). “Migrants held in the centers are systematically subjected to starvation and severe beatings, burned with hot metal objects, electrocuted and subjected to other forms of ill-treatment with the aim of extorting money from their families through a complex system of money transfers,” the UNSMIL report said. “Countless migrants and refugees lost their lives during captivity by smugglers, after being shot, tortured to death, or simply left to die from starvation or medical neglect,” the UNSMIL report added. “Across Libya, unidentified bodies of migrants and refugees bearing gunshot wounds, torture marks and burns are frequently uncovered in rubbish bins, dry river beds, farms and the desert.”

Exploited by human traffickers and traded as commodities, migrants fear for their daily survival.

“We have been abandoned here, I cannot go back and no one wants us anywhere,” an Eritrean refugee told MSF. “I don’t know where my place on earth is.” 

“We are dying,” detainees told the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “We live like animals; they beat us everyday.”