By Matthias Williams
Feb 17 (Reuters) – Migrants in Libya, including young girls, are at risk of being killed, tortured, raped or put into domestic slavery, according to a U.N. report that called for a moratorium on the return of migrant boats to the country until human rights are ensured.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe across the Mediterranean since the fall in 2011 of dictator Muammar Gaddafi to a NATO-backed uprising. Factional conflict has split the country into western and eastern factions since 2014.
In recent years, the EU and EU member states have supported and trained the Libyan coastguard, which returns migrants stopped at sea to detention centres, and have funded Libyan border management programmes.
A report published on Tuesday by the U.N. Human Rights Office and the U.N. Support Mission said migrants are rounded up and abducted by criminal trafficking networks, often with ties to the Libyan authorities and criminal networks abroad.
“They are separated from their families, arrested, and transferred to detention facilities without due process, often at gunpoint, in what amounts to arbitrary detention,” Thameen Al-Kheetan, spokesperson of the U.N. Human Rights Office, told a briefing in Geneva.
The Libya mission in Geneva and the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Libyan authorities have previously denied any systematic abuse of migrants.
A spokesperson for the EU Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report is based on interviews with almost 100 migrants, asylum seekers and refugees from 16 countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. They were interviewed inside and outside Libya.
It cited an Eritrean woman who was detained for over six weeks at a trafficking house in Tobruk, in eastern Libya. “I wish I died. It was a journey of hell,” she said.
“Different men raped me many times. Girls as young as 14 were raped daily,” she said. The perpetrators released her after her family paid a ransom.
The report, covering the period January 2024 to December 2025, described instances of a man being forced to work without pay or enough food, and of girls being separated from their mothers.
“Men used humiliating methods with women, making them, for example, take their clothes off in front of other men and women migrants before raping them publicly, torturing them, and beating them,” Suki Nagra, U.N. Human Rights representative at the U.N. mission in Libya, told the Geneva briefing.
The report emphasised the importance of life-saving search and rescue operations for migrants at sea but urged the international community to halt returns to Libya until adequate human rights safeguards are ensured.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Matthias Williams, additional reporting by Amina Ismail in Brussels, editing by Thomas Seythal, Alexandra Hudson)
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