The armed groups in Libya are killing and torturing thousands of civilians illegally detained in prisons, some of which are under the control of the government of Tripoli, an ally of Italy in the management of migratory flows in the Central Mediterranean.
The complaint comes from the report of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, entitled "Abuse Behind Bars: Arbitrary and unlawful detention in Libya", Which accuses the government of Prime Minister Fayez Serraj, supported by the UN and Italy, to allow armed groups to arrest opponents, activists, journalists and politicians, paying the fighters and even providing uniforms and military equipment. As a result, explains the document, the power of these groups has grown without any control, so much so that they now act independently without any monitoring by the Tripoline authority. Men, women and children are thus subject to arbitrary detention and torture, being falsely accused on the basis of alleged political affiliations or tribal ties. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein has called this a "pure horror", urging the Libyan government to release the illegal arrested and to prosecute those who have inflicted torture and are involved in serious criminal activities.
The report, published in collaboration with the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) documents all cases of torture and human rights violations carried out by 17 December 2015 to January 1 2018, which coincides with the inauguration of the Government of National Accord of Serraj.
Since October 2011, the month in which the regime of the dictator Muammar Gadhafi was overthrown by the intervention of NATO, led by the US and France, Libya has never made a democratic transition, going to the brink of a new civil war in the 2014 . The political authority has thus divided into two rival governments, one in the east of the country, in Tobruk, and the other in the west, in Tripoli. In December 2015, in the Moroccan city of Skhirat, a secret meeting was held to try to find a common solution that would put an end to the country's crisis, and the Government of National Accord (GNA), headed by Serraj, was created. This new government was supposed to unify the Libyan political landscape, while also helping to address the imminent danger of ISIS. However, both old governments refused to recognize the authority of the GNA, which managed to take office in Tripoli in March 2016. Even today, Serraj, despite UN support, is struggling to impose its authority on everything. the country.
For years now, human traffickers have taken advantage of this situation of political and economic instability, with the result that migrants are victims of continuous abuse, being captured and then forced into forced labor. On November 14, 2017, the CNN has published a video which shows a group of African migrants who, a short distance from Tripoli, are auctioned as slaves, a practice already reported by Othman Belbeisi, head of the IOM mission in Libya, the 11 April 2017. Following this, the 29 and 30 November, on the occasion of the summit of the European Union and the African Union in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, the Libya has reached an agreement with European leaders and Africans to perform emergency repatriation refugees and migrants who have suffered violence and abuse in Libyan detention centers. From the 28 November 2017 to the 14 March 2018, the IOM has helped a total 10.171 migrants to voluntarily return to their countries of origin from Libya, to which must be added the approximately 1.300 resettlement carried out by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The general chaos has also spilled over to citizens, who, as highlighted by the United Nations, are victims of torture and arbitrary detention. Armed groups use a variety of methods, including electric shocks, flogging and metal bars with which they beat people to death.
The official prisons controlled by the Ministry of Justice in Tripoli host about 6.500 inmates, while several thousands are held in structures, also in theory under government control, but they are managed by armed groups. For example, the center of the Mitiga air base, probably the largest in the country since it hosts 2,600 inmates, is managed by the Special Deterrence Forces (SDF) group, allied with the Serraj government. In the 2017, at least 37 bodies were found that showed evident signs of torture at the hospitals of the capital, as announced in the UN document. In the east of the country, at least 1.800 people are imprisoned at Kuweifiya, where the UN has documented as many cases of torture and abuse. This prison is under the control of the Libyan National Army, led by the general and strong man of the government of Tobruk, General Khalifa Haftar.
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