publications

V. Abuse during Arrest

At various times over the past decade, and most recently since 2004, Libyan authorities have engaged in wide-scale and systematic arrests of undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.75 Many of those Human Rights Watch interviewed described physical abuse and other mistreatment, and their testimonies are consistent with other published accounts.

Libyan security officials typically arrest migrants and refugees in two circumstances: at or near the borders – entering or departing the country – and during urban sweeps. In both circumstances, migrants and refugees reported abuse by Libyan police and prison guards. They also complained of overcrowding in detention facilities, poor sanitation and food, not knowing the reasons for their detention and not having access to a lawyer or legal review. In one case, a witness said he heard four women screaming and crying after security guards had taken them to separate rooms, suggesting the women had been sexually abused. In several cases, foreigners in Libya reported that the police let them go or allowed them to escape after they paid a bribe.

The arrests are largely geared towards repatriation, with the authorities detaining large groups of foreigners in various facilities for different lengths of time as they prepare them for return. Despite Human Rights Watch requests, the Libyan government provided no information on the procedures or criteria it uses to arrest undocumented foreigners. As the European Commission delegation to Libya looking into irregular migration concluded in its report, “[M]any of the illegal immigrants met in the [detention] centres seem to have been arrested on a random basis.”

Of the fifty-six migrants and refugees Human Rights Watch interviewed for this report, more than half said the Libyan authorities had detained them at some point during their stay. A similar proportion was reported by the American University in Cairo, which interviewed sixty-five refugees, asylum seekers and migrants for a January 2006 study on migration through Libya to Europe. Of those sixty-five interviewees, Libyan authorities had detained “just under half” and “almost all respondents expressed a constant fear of being detained.”76

As documented in the previous chapter, “Denial of the Right to Seek Asylum,” Libya has no asylum law or procedures. As such, detained individuals have no opportunity to submit an asylum request. On the contrary, the Libyan government forcibly returns many of the individuals detained for unauthorized presence, regardless of whether they might face persecution or torture upon their return.

The Libyan government maintains that the arrests of foreigners illegally in the country are necessary for public order, and that the security forces carry them out in accordance with immigration law.77 In its April 2006 memo to Human Rights Watch, the government said that some police officers “overindulge in the use of force” but that “the failings in these cases are nothing more than the isolated actions of individuals unrelated to methodology.” In such cases, “legal action was taken,” although the government did not provide statistics on the number of police charged or convicted for using excessive force or otherwise violating the law.78

The government flatly rejects claims that the police or other security forces have sexually abused detainees or used excessive force resulting in a foreigner’s death. “The level of bodily harm could never reach the point of death, critical condition or gross bodily harm, rape, violation of physical integrity,” the memo said.

Arrests on Entry and Departure

Libyan security forces frequently arrest migrants, asylum seekers and refugees on or near Libya’s borders as they are attempting to enter or leave the county. In one case, Libyan border police arrested a married couple from Eritrea, Tesfai and Almaz, on the outskirts of Kufra in April 2003. The couple, who had fled Eritrea in 1997 after both being forced to serve in the military, said they subsequently spent six years in Sudan. In 2003 they hired a smuggler to take them and their baby daughter to Libya. The border police caught them and twenty-five others in the vehicle, they said in a joint interview, and sent them to an unknown detention center where they remained for eight days. “They made us clean the courtyard as soon as we got up and whipped us if we stopped. They kicked us, beat us, for no reason,” Tesfai said, “When we asked for something to eat, the border policemen showed us a truck full of rotten food that cats were living in and told us to eat that.”79

According to the couple, the authorities held the twenty-eight detainees in one room without a window; Almaz with the baby was the only woman in the group. They slept on the floor without bedding. The police forced the group to work every day, either cleaning the courtyard or digging trenches, Tesfai and Almaz said. Their daughter became dehydrated, but the guards refused her medical attention. Tesfai spoke Arabic and understood that the border police were waiting to arrest more people, so they could deport them to Sudan en masse.

Fearful of being returned, the others in the group managed to escape the detention facility at night. Tesfai and Almaz decided not to leave because of their baby daughter. When the guards woke the next morning and saw the other detainees had escaped, one of them beat Tesfai in an attempt to learn where the men had gone. Later, however, the guard unexpectedly put the family in a car and released them in a Kufra park.

Another Eritrean who entered Libya from Sudan without authorization told Human Rights Watch that security forces arrested and beat him in Kufra, and he believes they sexually abused four women in his group. According to Barakat, twenty-three years old, he fled Eritrea to Sudan in June 2002 to escape military service. In August he went to Libya “because I saw so many people going to Libya.”80

Libyan forces in Kufra wearing khaki uniforms and carrying guns arrested him en route for illegal entry, together with four women and ten other men, he said. The security forces confiscated people’s money and beat the men. After the beating, four security members apparently tried to assault the four women in the building where they were being held. “Each man took one of the girls to a different room, and then we heard crying and shouting, so we rebelled,” he told Human Rights Watch. “This was at night. We were beaten for trying to rebel.”

Shortly thereafter Barakat managed to escape the detention facility, and he got to Tripoli, where he spent two months. “I wondered whether there was any organization or embassy in Libya who might help refugees,” he said. “I never heard of UNHCR being there. I thought my only chance was to jump to Italy to save my life.”

Barakat arrived in Italy in October 2002. He applied for asylum but was rejected and ordered to leave the country. As of May 2005, he was working without authorization and hiding from police.

A twenty-seven-year-old man from Darfur, Ahmad, said that Libyan police beat him shortly after his arrival in Libya. The man, who said he had fled his village in Darfur due to militia attacks in 1993, made it to Libya illegally that year in a truck of smuggled goods. The Libyan driver was kind, Ahmad said, and when the truck arrived in Kufra, the driver gave him money to travel on to Benghazi. Shortly after his arrival in town, he said, the police found him sleeping in a park. He told Human Rights Watch that they beat him, and one of the police officers whipped him with a belt with a large metal buckle that left a gash in his head.81

The police took Ahmad to a police station, and from there a man he described as a kind senior officer took him to the neighborhood in town where Sudanese migrants lived. The policeman also took him to a hospital to treat the wound on his head, he said. The doctor, a Bulgarian, asked who had hit him. When Ahmad said it was the police, the doctor wrote him a note and told him to report the case to the police. When Ahmad went to the police station with the note, the policemen allegedly replied angrily, tearing up the doctor’s note: “Get out of here and disappear…We can kill you if you do this,” Ahmad recalled one officer said.

Anabesa, a twenty-three-year-old Orthodox Christian Ethiopian woman now recognized as a refugee in Italy, told Human Rights Watch how Libyan police beat foreigners they had arrested after a failed attempt to reach Italy. According to the woman, she and forty-seven others took a smuggler’s boat from the Libyan coast in September 2003 but it sank along the way. Four people drowned, she said, and a French ship rescued the remaining forty-three (Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Moroccans and others from the Maghreb). The French handed the survivors over to the Libyans, who drove them to prison in a windowless truck. Along the way, Anabesa said, the Libyan security officials kicked and beat the migrants and refugees, including the women.82 Her experience in detention is recounted in Chapter VI, “Abuse in Detention.”

Arrests in Urban Sweeps

In 2001, the Libyan government initiated a more concerted effort to arrest migrants and refugees in urban areas following mob violence against foreigners in Zawiyya and other parts of the country in September 2000 (see chapter VIII, “Other Abuses Against Migrants and Refugees”). The government reportedly expelled thousands of foreigners without proper documentation to the borders with Niger and Chad, even if they did not come from those countries.83 In August 2003 the police intensified the effort by conducting broad sweeps, including raids on four migrant areas in Tripoli.84In some of these sweeps, witnesses said, Libyan security forces used excessive force.

A thirty-year-old Ethiopian man, Gebre, who has applied for asylum in Italy, recounted his experience of being caught in a police sweep in Tripoli in September 2003. Libyan police, armed but in civilian clothes, came to his home in the suburb of Gurgee, he said. They checked his documents and, finding that his identity card was forged, arrested him. The police arrested more than 100 other Ethiopians and Eritreans that night, among them women and children. Gebre claimed that the police used sticks and a plastic pipe about three feet long to beat the men, but not the women or children, at the time of arrest. The police also took Gebre’s savings without giving a receipt, he said. The police drove the arrested foreigners to a large prison somewhere outside Tripoli. In the prison, the guards told them they had been arrested because they were Christians, and “spies for Israel.”

Some migrants and refugees told Human Rights Watch that the police let them go or allowed them to escape after they paid a bribe. During five months in Tripoli in 2003, for example, an Eritrean man said the police had arrested him six or seven times, but usually let him go after he paid money. “It was a difficult situation because the police arrested us often and took us to the police station where they beat us and then let us go after we paid a certain sum of money,” he said. “Sometimes people were rearrested as they left the police station.”85

Ahmad from Darfur, mentioned above, said the police arrested him in 2002 in Shar`a al-Rashid, Tripoli, during a sweep for undocumented migrants, of which he was one. The police conducted regular sweeps on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the market in Tajura, he explained. “In the beginning they beat all the black foreigners. They didn’t even ask where you were from – just started beating,” Ahmad told Human Rights Watch. “But one day the police made a mistake and beat a black Libyan. After that they were more careful. They would ask you where you came from before they hit you.” Ahmad said the police put him in a room in a police station with over 100 people. He stayed there for five days before getting transferred to prison, where he claimed he stayed without charge for another two months.86

Mass arrests of undocumented foreigners apparently intensified in mid-2004. According to UNHCR and testimony from migrants and refugees in Libya at the time, the police conducted sweeps in the streets of Tripoli and Sebha, as well as going house to house. A Liberian named David B. who witnessed some of the arrests said the authorities took detainees to a facility he called “Janzur” (possibly the police station in Tripoli’s Janzur district), “where they were packed into a small open building… without proper healthcare services [or] food.”87 Some of the detainees died as a result of suffocation, trauma and hunger, David B. claimed.

According to UNHCR, the Libyan police arrested thirty-one refugees and asylum seekers with attestation letters from UNHCR during police sweeps that began around September 2004.88 The authorities detained all of these people in Tripoli’s al-Fellah deportation facility, with the exception of one Somali refugee whom they detained at the immigration department. The authorities eventually released these people after UNHCR mobilized the support of ambassadors from African Union states.89

According to one senior Libyan official, the Libyan government has stopped conducting large urban sweeps for undocumented migrants. “For the time being, we have stopped making arrests,” said `Ali Mdorad, General Director of Consular Affairs in the General People’s Committee for Foreign Liaison and International Cooperation. He suggested that current policy was to arrest only those leaving for Europe, not to conduct police sweeps in Tripoli or other cities.90

Mdorad did, however, say that the police continue to arrest foreigners who beg in the street, mainly Moroccans, Egyptians and Tunisians, whom Mdorad claimed are used in organized criminal networks run by their co-nationals. “Foreigners must have a job, so if we find someone doing this, we grab them.”

Mdorad and other Libyan officials deny that the police arbitrarily detain foreigners. They emphasize that the government is taking action to eradicate abuses by police officers at the time of arrest. After an investigation in 2004, he said, disciplinary measures were taken against policemen involved in three cases of corruption, although he did not provide specifics.

On August 8, 2004, a committee in the General People’s Committee for Public Security issued guidelines to protect the life and property of arrested foreigners, although it remains unclear to what extent they are implemented. These guidelines, viewed by Human Rights Watch, specify that:

“the collection and deportation is to be done quietly, without violence, beating or any other uncivilized act.”

“the money belonging to these persons is to be recorded in official registers and official minutes.”

“these people are to be treated in a proper manner while avoiding their harm and respecting their humanity.”

“[officials should] allow them to carry their belongings and monies and provide them the necessary transportation in coordination with the relevant departments.”91

Decision No. 67 (2004) of the Secretary of Public Security accompanying these guidelines calls for the formation of a committee to monitor the arrests, detentions and deportations of unauthorized migrants. Article 5 of this decision requires the committee to consider “the special constraints relating to human rights that guarantee the safety of people and property of illegal immigrants.”92

Human Rights Watch asked the Libyan government whether it had formed such a committee to monitor the arrests, detentions and deportations of undocumented foreigners and, if so, which officials were taking part. As of August 1, 2006, the government had not replied.93




75 Here and throughout this report, the phrase “migrants and refugees” should be understood to include asylum seekers and persons otherwise in need of international protection.

76 Hamood, p. 30.

77 The main Libyan law regulating the entry, stay and departure of foreigners is Law No. 6 (1987), as amended by Law No. 2 (2004). See chapter IX, “Legal Standards.”

78 Libyan government memo to Human Rights Watch, April 18, 2006. See Appendix I.

79 Human Rights Watch interviews with Tesfai H. and Almaz N., Rome, May 25, 2005.

80 Human Rights Watch interview with Barakat T., Rome, May 25, 2005.

81 Human Rights Watch interview with Ahmad A., Rome, May 27, 2005.

82 Human Rights Watch interview with Anabesa C., Rome, May 25, 2005.

83 U.S. Department of State, Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Libya, 2001, released March 4, 2002, available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/nea/8273.htm, as of March 13, 2006.

84 The four areas were known as: the Airport Road Camp (mostly Nigerians and West Africans); the Crimea Camp (Chadians and Sudanese); the second Crimea Camp (West Africans); and the Zahra area camp, called Ghot Bu Sag. The Libyan authorities bulldozed all except the last, which was the only one remaining in 2005. All were on land owned by the government, except the Airport Road Camp where a private landlord was involved. Human Rights Watch interview, Tripoli, April 2005, name withheld.

85 Human Rights Watch interviews with Tesfai H. and Almaz N., Rome, May 25, 2005.

86 Human Rights Watch interview with Ahmad A., Rome, May 27, 2005.

87 E-mail communication from David B. to Human Rights Watch, August 2004.

88 Those detained included: twelve Liberian refugees; two Somali refugee families, one with four children and one with six (unexplainably, the father of the family with six children was not detained, only the mother and children); one Somali refugee (detained separately); three Ethiopian asylum seekers; three Eritrean asylum seekers, one of whom was detained with two children (eight-month-old twins); and one Congolese asylum seeker.

89 Human Rights Watch interview with UNHCR officials, Tripoli, April 21, 2005.

90 Human Rights Watch interview with `Ali Mdorad, Tripoli, April 30, 2005.

91 Document on file with Human Rights Watch.

92 Decision No. 67/2004 of the General People’s Committee for Security, unofficial translation by Human Rights Watch.

93 Human Rights Watch also asked the Libyan government how many policemen and border guards it had investigated and punished for violating the guidelines.