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VI. Abuse in Detention

In addition to abuses at the time of arrest, migrants and refugees reported numerous violations during their detention at a variety of facilities in Libya, including beatings, sub-standard conditions, and denial of access to legal counsel. In three cases, witnesses reported that physical abuse by guards led to a person’s death. Three interviewees reported that security officials threatened women detainees with sexual violence, and one witness saw what he believed to be a rape. While detention conditions for migrants and refugees have reportedly improved in recent years, the evidence suggests that many of these abuses persist.

Struggling to cope with the large influx of migrants and refugees, the Libyan authorities have used a variety of detention facilities. Interviewees reported being held in police stations, ordinary prisons (sometimes with regular criminals), military bases and in camps with tents in the desert. Human Rights Watch asked the Libyan government if it had standards for the detention of foreigners but, as of August 1, 2006, the government had not replied. Migrants and refugees report overcrowding, inadequate health care and highly restricted access to visitors and lawyers.

A European Commission technical mission visited detention sites across Libya in late 2004 and reported that it found the conditions varied “from relatively acceptable to extremely poor.”⁹⁴ There were short-term and long-term centers, the mission said, and the long-term centers are comparable to prisons. The mission reported overcrowding, detainees claiming to have been fed only bread and water, detainees held for seven months or more without legal review, detention of unaccompanied children, and instances where those detained seemed to have valid documents for residence in the country.

Human Rights Watch noted an additional problem: endemic corruption in the immigration system. Migrants and refugees consistently reported that detainees could buy their way out of detention by bribing guards or their commanders.

As noted above, the Libyan government claims that the authorities treat foreigners within the parameters of the law, and prosecute officials who overstep their bounds by using excessive force or otherwise maltreating those in detention. The government admitted that some detention facilities are overcrowded, but attributed this to the large number of illegal migrants, the lack of funds, and the slow response time of some embassies and consulates, which must confirm the identity of their nationals before a deportation can commence. “It is difficult to find a quick solution to the question of overcrowding due to the huge numbers of illegal migrants that enter the Libyan Jamahiriya,” the government said. Such a large number requires “a large amount of funds not within the Libyan Jamahiriya’s capability.”⁹⁵

Bribery is punishable under Law No. 2 (1979), the government said. In the case of corruption by a state employee or police officer, “it is assured that the specialized branches will take the legal procedures in any specific case reported to it.” The government did not say how many cases of bribery or corruption it had investigated or prosecuted.

Libya is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), article 9 of which states that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention [or] be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as are established by law.” Detention is considered “arbitrary” if it is not authorized by law or in accordance with law. It is also arbitrary when it is random, capricious, or not accompanied by fair procedures for legal review.⁹⁶

Arbitrary detention has also been defined not only as contrary to law but as including elements of injustice and lack of predictability. Due to the growing phenomenon of indefinite detention of migrants and refugees, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has developed criteria for determining whether the deprivation of liberty of migrants and asylum seekers is arbitrary. Principle Three mandates that a migrant or asylum seeker placed in custody “be brought promptly before a judge or other authority,” and Principle Seven requires that a “maximum period should be set by law and the custody may in no case be unlimited or of excessive length.”⁹⁷

Detention Conditions in Kufra

Most migrants and refugees who are intercepted as they enter in the southeast from Sudan or Chad are detained in or near the desert town of Kufra. The government appears to have detained migrants and refugees in a variety of camps in the area. Interviewees reported a host of abuses there, including severe physical abuse.

A senior Libyan official dealing with immigration, `Ali Mdorad, admitted that the detention conditions in Kufra were at times bad. A pregnant woman died, he said, without explaining how. The government subsequently arranged to repatriate 130 adults at the facility from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia with the assistance of their respective embassies and IOM, he said, which gave each person U.S. $100. (IOM denied giving money to people Libya has returned.⁹⁸) Bringing embassy officials to people in Libya who may face persecution from their governments posed no problem, Mdorad said, because “[N]one of them said they were afraid.”⁹⁹

Eight individuals detained in and around Kufra, three of whom were subsequently granted asylum in Italy, told Human Rights Watch about the maltreatment they witnessed and experienced in various detention facilities. Abraha, a refugee from Eritrea who fled his country in 2002 after he protested mandatory military service, told Human Rights Watch how Libyan security forces arrested him for lack of documents and took him to a police station in Kufra in 2002. The two smugglers who had brought him into Libya for U.S. $200 were at the station, and the police were beating one of them, he said. The police said they only wanted the smugglers and would let Abraha and the approximately twenty-five other people go, but they kept them at the station for three days. The detainees slept on the ground without bedding in a courtyard, but received food and water. The women and children slept at the other end of the courtyard.

After three days, the authorities transferred the group to a prison outside Kufra, where the conditions were notably worse. The prison had no doctor and, to Abraha’s knowledge, the guards never took anyone elsewhere for medical care. Abraha stayed in a cell with about forty men that had one toilet. The guards did not allow them out for one month, and over the following two months, let them out on an arbitrary basis. “It depended on the guard,” Abraha said.  The detainees could not make phone calls, contact a lawyer or have visitors. He told Human Rights Watch:

Nobody would know if we were alive or dead because we couldn’t communicate with anyone… We asked to speak to the prison director to demand information, but the guards kept saying “tomorrow, tomorrow.” Then the director did come and told us we had to wait until they determined the day we would be repatriated. The Eritrean ambassador came one day, saying he was there to help us get out, but he was really there to repatriate us.¹⁰⁰

Abraha and others went on a hunger strike to protest the detention conditions, but they gave up after fifteen days because they felt weak. Abraha and two others became sick, and the guards lay them on the ground in the courtyard. According to Abraha, the prison director came and hit the three men with a rubber baton. The group of hunger-striking detainees revolted, but the guards managed to get them back in their cells. “Two were really hurt, and a doctor came the next day to look at them,” Abraha said.

After three months, the prison director told the detainees that the Libyan government did not have enough money to send them back to Eritrea, but that they could go to Sudan. The director took all of the prisoners – about 100 people in total – and drove them in four vehicles towards Sudan. When they stopped along the way, all the prisoners paid the director $100 each to be taken back to Kufra and were left on the side of the road. From Kufra, Abraha paid $200 to get to Tripoli, where he spent approximately six weeks. He then paid a smuggler $1,000 to take a boat with more than 150 people to Italy. He arrived in March 2003 after two days at sea and received refugee status in May 2005.

Another Eritrean refugee, Teclu, who now has refugee status in Italy, told Human Rights Watch about his three-month detention in a prison in Kufra, where the guards regularly beat the detainees. He said the authorities detained him in 2002 with approximately one hundred inmates, both criminals and immigrants. He and four other men shared a cell without a window or beds. According to Teclu, Libyan officials interrogated him “morning and night” after his arrest. They beat him repeatedly with electric cords and a whip, he said, asking him the whereabouts and names of other immigrants who had escaped the police, and details of their unauthorized entry. The interrogations and beatings continued for about twenty days, and then sporadically after that. Teclu said he was not allowed to make any phone calls or contact a lawyer.¹⁰¹

Iskinder, an Ethiopian refugee, said he paid a smuggler $300 to get from Sudan to Kufra in January 2002 but Libyan security forces arrested the group he was traveling with upon arrival. According to Iskinder, he spent one year in a prison on a military base on the outskirts of Kufra with approximately 170 people, seventy of them women. “For a whole year, I couldn’t call or write anyone,” he said. “They told us only that they were trying to get in touch with our countries to repatriate us.” Two adult men died while he was there, he said, but he did not know the cause of death. “They were sick and they weren’t taken care of,” he explained. “We slept on the floor, and they caught colds. They were also really depressed.”

Iskinder said the guards never let the detainees out of their cells. At some point (he did not know the date), they protested with a hunger strike. He told Human Rights Watch how the Libyan authorities responded:

We were stuck there, they weren’t sending us back. We were locked in like animals. So we went on hunger strike, all of us, for five days. The colonel came with lots of guards and surrounded the courtyard and let us all out of the cells. We told the colonel that we didn’t understand why we were there if we weren’t accused of any crime. The colonel told us he would get in touch with our countries, and we said we would wait for his answer sitting right there in the courtyard. That’s when the guards started hitting everyone with sticks and shooting into the air to force us back into our cells.¹⁰²

Some three months later, during deportation, Iskinder paid a bribe and escaped, making it to Tripoli, where he spent six months. In June 2003 he paid $1,000 to get smuggled by boat to Italy. “There were about 110 people in the small fishing boat,” he said. “We landed at Lampedusa at dawn, but there was no one around, so we just waited on the boat for the police to come.” When Italian authorities arrived, Iskinder asked for political asylum. In May 2005 he received a one-year permit for humanitarian reasons.¹⁰³

In a more recent case, Woldemariam, an Eritrean seeking asylum in Italy as of May 2005, was arrested outside Kufra in March 2004 for lack of documents, just after he entered Libya from Sudan. Libyan authorities detained him and forty-six other people, including two children, for three weeks in a desert camp with tents, about forty kilometers from the town, he said. Woldemariam stayed in a tent with approximately fifteen men and the women and children stayed in a tent by themselves.

According to Woldemariam, the guards frequently beat the detainees. He told Human Rights Watch:

At night the guards would smoke hashish and then come through with a flashlight and pick out people to beat. One night they came through, and I lifted up my head. They asked me my religion, and I said Christian, so they took me outside and beat me. Two other men said they were Muslim, and they weren’t taken out.¹⁰⁴

Woldemariam added that often the guards made the men say they were Jewish while they beat them. At other times the guards ordered the men to stay in a push-up position on their knuckles and toes for extended periods. “After a while, your whole body begins to shake,” Woldemariam said. “Whenever someone fell, the guards would beat him.”

One night one of the men escaped, only to be found four hours later collapsed in the desert. That night, the guards made all the men in the camp strip naked and lie down on the ground, Woldemariam said. Approximately ten guards beat the men on their heads and bodies with rubber batons.

According to Woldemariam, the guards sometimes went into the women’s tent at night, but the camp commander ordered them to stop. “The guards would go to that tent at night to bother the girls,” he said. “We would have defended them even with our lives. We spoke with the camp head, and he told the guards to stop.”

After three weeks in the tent camp, the authorities transferred the detainees to a prison in Kufra. According to Woldemariam, it was a regular prison, with about 600 inmates, and the authorities placed him in a cell with 150 other undocumented migrants of different nationalities. Approximately fifteen women and children stayed in a separate cell. At one point the guards took a pregnant woman to the hospital and then let her go.

Woldemariam’s cell had one toilet, and the detainees also used it to clean themselves with buckets of water, which is where the detainees also bathed. They never received a change of clothes, pillow, blankets or sheets, and there were no beds. The cell had one window with bars, and the guards let the men out of the cell three times a day for a headcount. They ate boiled rice or pasta once a day. They were not allowed to make phone calls or receive visitors. At one point the Eritrean ambassador came to identify Eritreans for repatriation. “Most of us said we were Ethiopian to avoid being sent back,” Woldemariam said.

In June 2004, many of the Eritreans and Ethiopians revolted over the lack of food: “We decided to revolt, we threw anything at them, our cups and plates,” Woldemariam said. Following the revolt, security officials took all the Eritreans and Ethiopians back to the desert camp. At the camp, Woldemariam bribed a guard to let him go. He eventually made it to Tripoli and then paid $1,400 for a boat to Italy. He arrived in September, after a three-day journey at sea, and applied for asylum.

Conditions in Other Detention Facilities

Libyan authorities have detained migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in a variety of facilities across the country. In September 2004, Somalis deported from Libya told reporters in Mogadishu that Libyan police had held them in a chemical warehouse, causing them to develop skin problems.¹⁰⁵

In September 2003, the Ethiopian refugee Anabesa made her first attempt to reach Italy from Libya on a smuggler’s boat, with forty-seven other people. As described in Chapter V, “Abuse During Arrest,” the boat sank and four people drowned before the crew of a French ship rescued the survivors, handing them over to Libyan authorities.

The Libyans detained the group at a prison about one-and-a-half-hours’ drive from the coast, she said. She thought it was a detention center for “immigrants and refugees only.” Four pregnant women were among the group, and one immediately gave birth. The authorities released the other three women shortly before they were due to give birth. A four-year-old boy whose mother had drowned in the attempted crossing was also in the group. His father came and took him back to Eritrea.

According to Anebesa, the guards at the camp regularly beat the detainees with plastic tubing. After about six weeks, the authorities tried to transfer the women in the group, which would have entailed separating husbands and wives. The male detainees protested vigorously, which prompted further beatings including with batons that gave an electric shock.

The authorities transferred the women to a facility in Misrata despite the protest. Anebesa stayed with twelve other women in a small cell that had no showers. They washed with water brought to them in plastic bottles and were allowed only one trip to the toilet per day. They got bread and tea in the morning and one meal of rice during the day. According to Anebesa, the conditions were extremely unsanitary, and many of the women fell sick. She said that one Ethiopian woman died after she went on a hunger strike to protest the conditions, but she could not recall her name.

The male guards also threatened the women detainees sexually, Anebesa said. She described the fear in which the women lived:

Whenever we needed to collect the food, we women all went together, all thirteen of us, so that we never left a woman in a room alone. This was successful in preventing attacks. In the same way, at night, the male guards would come with a set of keys and let themselves into our cell. We would always wake each other up when this happened and sit down in a group and start crying and screaming, until they gave up and went out.¹⁰⁶

In Misrata, Anebesa claimed to have seen the guards beat a Nigerian man to death after he tried to escape but she did not know his name. They also tortured a Ghanaian man by tying his feet and hands behind his back and leaving him outside in the sun covered in sugar syrup, which attracted flies, she said.

Anebesa spent three months in Misrata and then bribed a guard to let her and three other women escape. She took another boat to Italy, arriving in December 2003, and subsequently got refugee status. Some of the people she was arrested with stayed in Misrata for up to nine months, she said.

Two other persons interviewed by Human Rights Watch, both Eritreans, were also held at different times at a facility in Misrata. Both alleged that guards routinely beat the detainees.¹⁰⁷

According to an Ethiopian refugee, Getachew, the authorities held him at a detention facility apparently only for foreigners near Tripoli for twenty-nine days in late 2003. The guards forced the detainees to carry blocks of cement on a construction site, he said, and they beat with a stick those who could not carry the heavy loads. In one case, he claimed, the guards beat a fellow Ethiopian so badly that they broke his spinal cord and he died. He did not know the man’s name.¹⁰⁸

Getachew managed to escape by bribing a guard. He worked without a permit to earn money and then paid for a trip to Italy, arriving in October 2004. As of May 2005, his asylum claim was pending.

The Eritrean journalist and refugee Yohannes, who fled to Libya in 2002 after failing to find protection in Sudan, was arrested as his car tried to skirt checkpoints near Kufra in 2002. He told Human Rights Watch that he spent time in four prisons in different parts of Libya.

First was a place he called “Ogella,” where the authorities kept him in solitary confinement and beat him over the course of his two-month stay. At 6:00 p.m. every day they beat him with sticks and kicked him, telling him that he must convert to Islam, he said. Once they beat him so hard with a stick on his head that he lost consciousness. “They told me I was a spy and laughed while they tortured me,” he said.

At a facility he called “Jalo,” the authorities kept him alone in a cell for about two months. The guards beat him while forcing him to renounce Christianity and pray to Allah, he said. He was then moved to what he called “El Jdabiyah,” where he stayed in a cell with about fifty migrants and refugees from Chad. The guards beat him there as well, and forced him to pray to Allah, he said. At this facility, he became very sick. One day he was too sick to move when they called the prisoners outside to the yard, which angered the guards. They put cigarettes out on his leg to make him move, he said, and Human Rights Watch saw two burn scars on one leg that Yohannes said were from the attack. After nearly two months in this prison, the authorities transferred him to a prison in Benghazi. There, he claims, the guards beat prisoners in the corridors. In one case they beat a prisoner from Chad so badly that he died, Yohannes said, although he did not provide details. Shortly thereafter, Yohannes bribed some guards and managed to escape, making it to Italy, where he submitted an asylum request.¹⁰⁹

Ephrem S., the refugee from Ethiopia with an Ethiopian father and Eritrean mother, spent time in March 2001 in a facility in Tripoli, where the sanitary conditions were dangerously bad. According to Ephrem, he was arrested when the smuggler’s boat he was taking to Italy faced trouble and the group was rescued by Italian fishermen, who handed them over to Libyan authorities. Ephrem spent twelve days in what he believed was a regular Tripoli prison. The Muslims and Christians were separated, he said, and Ephrem stayed in a large room with some thirty men. They ate “disgusting” food all together in one dish, he said. There were no showers or other washing facilities and only one toilet for the thirty men. No one could talk to the guards, and they were not allowed outside. “Many of us were afraid for our lives. We thought they would deport or kill us,” he told Human Rights Watch. “I had no chance to tell anyone that I was a refugee, that I was afraid.”¹¹⁰ Ephrem managed to escape the facility and make it to Italy in 2002, where he was granted refugee status.

Teclu, the twenty-three-year-old Eritrean refugee mentioned above, told Human Rights Watch what happened after his arrest while attempting to leave Libya for Italy, and the abuse he saw at his place of detention, including possible sexual abuse. The police arrested him and a group of foreigners in May 2003, he said, while they were waiting for a smuggler’s boat to arrive. According to Teclu, he spent three months at a Navy base in Zlitan. He explained the conditions at the base:

We lived in the courtyard, divided by nationality and sex into different sections of the courtyard. The soldiers were young, and they smoked a lot of hashish. They made us run around the courtyard in the morning while they threw things at us, anything they could get their hands on.¹¹¹

According to Teclu, all of the detained men slept outdoors; they were not given bedding. The women and children stayed in a garage-like structure at one end of the courtyard. “The guards would go there at night, and the women would scream,” Teclu said. “The men would go see what was going on, but the soldiers would beat them. I can’t swear to it, I don’t know if any of them were raped. If they were, they wouldn’t say so for the shame.”

In the end of July 2003, the commander of the facility said that all those who had paid the smugglers in local currency could go free, while those who had paid in U.S. dollars would remain. Teclu was released, and he claims the director told him and the others that they could stay in Libya and work if they wanted, but that it was prohibited to try to reach Europe. In August, Teclu paid $1,000 and took a boat to Italy, where he received refugee status.

Deportation Facilities

The Libyan government has two types of facilities to hold undocumented foreigners before it deports them from Libya: “voluntary” and “involuntary.” The voluntary centers are occupied by migrants and refugees who agree to go home. Most of these centers are in Tripoli.

According to the authorities, the voluntary centers are “open,” meaning the residents can come and go as they please while their repatriation is being arranged. The European Commission mission to Libya in November-December 2004, however, observed that the residents of the voluntary center on Tripoli’s al-Fellah Street (located near the involuntary center on the same street) were too afraid to leave the area. Instead, the mission report said, they “sit still with their luggage as they do not dare to leave for fear of being arrested by the Police.”¹¹²

A western journalist who visited the voluntary center on al-Fellah Street in the latter part of 2004 was denied entry by armed Libyan police. She spoke to non-Libyans around the center and, according to her report, several hundred Ghanaians and Nigerians were sleeping in tents in an area surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire and guarded by police. Migrants said the center was overflowing as people waited for flights home.¹¹³

The Libyan immigration official `Ali Mdorad agreed that the term “voluntary” was relative because some of the people in the voluntary centers had agreed to go home due to fear of arrest and detention in one of the involuntary facilities.¹¹⁴ They might also have been attracted by the $100 that the Libyan government said IOM gives each person who volunteers to go home, although IOM denied paying such money.¹¹⁵

The conditions in the involuntary facilities are worse, although evidence suggests that they are improving. Unlike the voluntary centers, full of people who have agreed to go home, the involuntary facilities hold undocumented foreigners arrested and held by the police until their deportation. Those fearing persecution back home have no possibility to submit an asylum claim or to challenge their deportation.

According to the Libyan government, detained foreigners are first held in smaller detention sites around the country. “Sometimes we gather and feed them,” `Ali Mdorad explained, “but this is not detention, only very temporary holding.” Detainees are given three meals a day and provided basic health care, he said. “If you visit them, you are likely to find overcrowding and conditions not up to U.S. and E.U. standards, but they are being treated and fed the same as us.”¹¹⁶

After the initial holding period, the authorities transfer the detainees to the larger involuntary facilities. The main involuntary deportation facility is on Tripoli’s al-Fellah Street, known as the al-Fellah camp. The other permanent deportation facilities are in Misrata (200 km east of Tripoli), Sulmam (between Sabrata and Zuwarah, west of Tripoli), Kufra and Sebha.

The future of the deportation centers is unclear. Director of the immigration department Muhammad al-Ramalli told Human Rights Watch that the impact of Law No. 2 (2004) to regulate the entry, stay and departure of foreigners in Libya will be the eventual elimination of the camps. (For discussion of Law No. 2, see Chapter IX, “Legal Standards”.) Instead, under the new law, the government will charge undocumented foreigners and bring them before courts where judges would either sentence them to deportation within twenty-four hours, or imprison them for up to one year.¹¹⁷

Conditions in al-Fellah Deportation Center

Human Rights Watch visited the involuntary al-Fellah deportation center twice, on April 25 and on May 9, 2005. The conditions at the facility improved markedly between the two visits, with the authorities painting the walls, installing beds and providing more food, according to Human Rights Watch’s physical inspection and interviews with detainees.

In the brief visit on April 25, Human Rights Watch counted twenty-seven detainees at the facility from countries including Liberia, Côte D’Ivoire, Guinea, Morocco, Bangladesh and Congo. Human Rights Watch was able to briefly put questions to a small group of detainees – three Liberians, one Ivorean, one Guinean and one Congolese. The conditions at the facility were generally acceptable, they said, but they feared going home.¹¹⁸

The facility consisted of a large, rectangular open-air courtyard, with some six sleeping rooms on one long side opposite the gate, three rooms on one short side and a cooking area on the other short side. The sleeping rooms had approximately twenty mattresses and blankets on the floor, and toilets were in separate rooms to the side.

On the second visit, immigration officials told Human Rights Watch that the facility was holding 172 persons slated for repatriation, among them forty-three Egyptians. There were also Moroccans, Nigerians, Congolese, Ghanaians, Ivoreans and Liberians.¹¹⁹

On this second visit, the rooms had bunk beds, which the detainees said the authorities had installed days before. The walls had fresh paint. The facility was clean and orderly. The officials showed a small medical clinic staffed by a doctor, and said that detainees were transferred to the hospital if seriously sick.

No women or children were being held in the facility at the time, but the official in charge of Libya’s deportation facilities told Human Rights Watch that they kept women and children in their own room.¹²⁰ A delegation from the European Parliament that visited the al-Fellah facility in April 2005 did interview some female detainees. According to the delegation’s report, the women did not complain of harassment or maltreatment, but they did ask for a female doctor and better care for unaccompanied minors. Libyan officials told the delegation that the total number of detainees in al-Fellah ranged from fewer than 100 to more than 700.¹²¹

Human Rights Watch conducted brief interviews in a group with nine of the detainees, all of whom had been arrested for lacking the proper documentation. They said the conditions at the facility were generally good, especially on the day of Human Rights Watch’s visit, when the authorities provided ample amounts of chicken. “I’ve never seen so much chicken,” one man said. Most of the men had been at the center for about two weeks, and one had been there for one month.¹²² The detainees main complaint was not having information about their pending deportations and not being able to phone their families back home. The authorities only made a local phone available for use. “We do not know when we’re leaving,” said a thirty-two-year-old Egyptian man who had paid about $2,000 in Egypt to be smuggled through Libya to Italy. “There is no news.”¹²³ Two of the nine men, an Egyptian and a Nigerian, said the Libyan police had beaten them after their arrests.¹²⁴

The conditions Human Rights Watch observed in al-Fellah were dramatically better than what a refugee said he saw in December 2004. The man, a Liberian who has subsequently left Libya, said he bribed the camp guards with cigarettes to let him in, so he could take care of friends who had been detained. Inside, he told Human Rights Watch, he saw “a lot of refugees and other detainees who are suffering from chest infection due to the degree of cold inside the prison” and “lots of children who are severely sick and malnourished.” There had been no water for three days when he visited, he said, and no medical treatment was available. Detainees with contagious diseases were mixed with the other detainees. According to the man, the detainees had previously rioted due to the poor conditions.¹²⁵