Outsourcing Repression
How the EU is Funding Detention Camps in Libya
Since the start of the refugee crisis, Europe has voluntarily placed refugees in the hands of militia leaders abroad. EU funds have landed in the hands of border police in Sudan, detention centers and coast guards in Libya, and military barracks in Niger. These projects have been funded with money meant to protect human rights but by securitizing migration and externalizing border controls, the EU has clearly geared towards migration containment at all costs, turning authoritarian countries into the border guards of Europe.
Since the early 2000s, the EU has been directly funding the construction of detention centers in Libya, with Italy being a forerunner at this with the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding. From 2004 to 2011 the EU aided €41.6 million for the development of 14 projects for migration management in Libya, even though the OHCHR denounced the total absence of protection for refugees in the region. Europe’s first involvement in Libya under humanitarian pretexts came in 2009, with the European Council’s Presidency Conclusions supporting “cooperation at sea, border control and readmission” with Libya. Then in 2010, the EU launched the Sahara-Med project with the official goal of “prevention and management of irregular migration flow from the Sahara Desert to the Mediterranean Sea.” The Italian Ministry of Interior took the lead for its implementation, using the €10 million funding allocated by the EU for the training and maintenance of the patrol boats.
The relationship between the Libyan Coast Guard and EU member states continued in 2011 with EUBAM, a mission in support of integrated border management, then ENFM, and finally, Frontex, which often guides the Libyan Coast Guard in illegally detaining asylum seekers. The mandate of EUBAM, meant to support Libya in securitizing its borders, has been recently extended until 2023 and is unsurprisingly headed by an Italian.
The EU is clearly funding projects in Libya that have little to do with humanitarian purposes. The provision of military equipment, police training, and biometric technology by defense firms is an attempt to externalize border control and create a fortress Europe that places refugees in the hands of militias and not humanitarian organizations. Indeed, in 2016, Operation Sophia was launched to train members of the Libyan Coast Guard, a goal turned into a top priority in the Malta Declaration of 2017, aimed at ensuring control of Europe’s external border by providing “training, equipment, and support to the Libyan National Coast Guard.” The strategy was formally implemented through the IBM Project (2017) and funded through EUTFA with €91.3 million, of which Libya is the third-largest recipient. Since EUTFA isn’t part of the EU budget, it is not subject to the scrutiny of the European Parliament. Established in 2015 at the Euro-African summit in Valletta with the goal of “addressing the root causes of migration,” EUTFA reserves almost €2.6 billion to international cooperation and development programs that are partly used for military border control initiatives, as documented by the investigation “Diverted Aid.” These projects are “designed to restrict and discourage irregular migration, with only “3% of the budget being allocated to developing safe and regular routes,” as a 2017 investigation by Oxfam highlights.
Just like EUTFA, the IBM program also lacks transparency and accountability, as evidenced by refusals to give access to European citizens to information on their operations. The lack of transparency becomes even more serious in the context of tortures and abuse of detained refugees in the hands of the same Libyan Coastguard that is ‘trained’ and financed by the EU. In 2017, Access Info got hold of disclosed documents that reveal negligence of human rights protection in EU training of Libyan Coast Guards: it shows how the protection of human rights constituted only a marginal part (0.5%) of Frontex operations. The same issue motivated a petition signed in April 2020 by GLAN and 2 other Italian legal organizations to the European Court of Auditors to request an audit into EU’s cooperation with Libya. The three organizations accused the EU of misplacing money meant for development purposes while being complicit in human rights abuses in Libya.
The diversion of EU funds to border control has also been explicitly condemned by the European Parliament. In 2017, during a speech at the European Parliament, Federica Mogherini mentioned ‘many times that our goal is to close the detention centers’. Yet nothing has changed. That same year, EUTFA allocated €90 million to counter migration in Libya, and part of that money went to 23 detention centers for illegal migrants controlled by the government of Al-Sarraj. Those same detention centers that the EU has invested in have been described by the UN Mission for Libya (UNSMIL) in a report published in December of 2017 as places of extortion and violence “largely controlled by armed groups,” while “members of the institutions participate in human trafficking activities.”
While EU projects have been successful in reducing the number of refugees that cross the Mediterranean, from over 1 million in 2015 to 140,000 in 2018, it is necessary to ask at what cost this is happening. When looking at different kinds of statistics it is clear that the reduction of asylum seekers arriving in Europe is coming at the expense of many lives. An alarming statistic is that the chances of dying in waters off the coast of Libya have increased from 1 in 42 in 2017 to 1 in 18 in 2018 according to UNHCR. The reduction of departures from Libyan coasts has been celebrated as a success in preventing deaths at sea and fighting the networks of traffickers, but the above-mentioned projects prove otherwise and raise questions about whether the EU crisis response has brought about a “policy-made humanitarian crisis” by funding authoritarian regimes and perpetuating human right abuses. More than a question, this is the reality of externalization measures destined to characterize the European budget for the coming years.
