UN: most women migrants suffer gang assaults in Libya

The overwhelming majority of women and older girls who passed through Libya as migrants reported being gang-raped by traffickers or seeing others taken away to be abused, the UN said in a report on Thursday.

But gang rape is just one of many “unimaginable horrors” migrants are being subjected to as they pass through the largely lawless country in hopes of reaching Europe.

The report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Support Mission in Libya covers the period from January in 2017 to August this year and was based on interviews with 1,300 migrants in Libya, Italy and Nigeria.

The investigators heard first-hand accounts of “a terrible litany of violations and abuses committed by a range of state officials, armed groups, smugglers and traffickers against migrants and refugees”.

These included murder, torture, arbitrary detention, gang rape, slavery, forced labour and extortion.

The report says that the situation in Libya – where rival governments in the east and west are vying for power and militias formed during the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qaddafi hold sway in many areas – means that migrants and refugees are viewed “as commodities to be exploited and extorted”.

The report comes as EU leaders pursue efforts to strengthen the bloc’s external borders to prevent large numbers of migrants from entering.

The Libyan coastguard, funded and supported by European nations, intercept many migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, where they are put in detention centres.

About 29,000 migrants have been returned to Libya by its coastguard since early last year and transferred to immigration centres.

The report also suggests that “some state actors, including local officials, members of armed groups formally integrated into state institutions, and representatives of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence are complicit in the trafficking of migrants”.

“Tackling the rampant impunity would undercut the parallel illicit economy built on the abuse of these people and help establish the rule of law and national institutions,” said Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Ghassan Salame, the UN special envoy to Libya, said: “There is a local and international failure to handle this hidden human calamity that continues to take place in Libya.”