In mid-January, without explanation, the Libyan government officially shut down Al Mabani, the country’s most notorious prison for the detention of migrants. The prison, which first opened in January of 2021, had previously held several thousand people under ghastly conditions in a set of makeshift warehouses in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.
Al Mabani, which means “The Buildings�� in Arabic, functioned as part of a shadow immigration system created by the European Union to stop migrants, many of them from sub-Saharan Africa, from reaching Europe’s shores. When the migrant crisis began, in the early twenty-tens, the dominant tone on the continent was one of compassion. Angela Merkel promised to welcome migrants, saying, “We can do this!” But as the crisis accelerated, and as nationalist parties began fanning xenophobic fears, Europe searched for ways to keep migrants out. One of its primary partners in this endeavor has been Libya, which, after the fall of its longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi, became a failed state, run by rival governments and powerful militias. The E.U. now equips and trains the Libyan Coast Guard, an assortment of patrols with links to militias, to patrol the Mediterranean Sea and intercept migrant rafts before they arrive in Europe. The migrants are then held in a network of Libyan prisons run by militias.
Migrants at Al Mabani and elsewhere have routinely faced sexual assault, deprivation of food and health care, savage beatings, and forced labor at construction sites, on farms, in private homes, and in military facilities. The trade in captive migrants is big business in Libya, and the militias that run the detention centers make money on detainees through extortion and ransom. At Al Mabani, migrants typically had to pay about five hundred dollars for their release. Human-rights abuses at Al Mabani reached a peak in October, when armed men rounded up and detained as many as five thousand migrants from a nearby slum. In the following days, guards fired on migrants attempting to escape, killing six and injuring two dozen more. Federico Soda, the head of the Libya mission for the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, said at the time, “Some of our staff who witnessed this incident describe injured migrants in a pool of blood lying on the ground.”
In November, The New Yorker, in collaboration with the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization where we work, published an investigation into abuses at Al Mabani. (On Monday, the investigation was recognized with a George Polk Award for International Reporting.) The piece told the story of Aliou Candé, a climate migrant from Guinea-Bissau, who was intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard in the Mediterranean Sea and sent to Al Mabani. He succeeded in getting a message out to his family on a phone that he managed to hold onto in prison: “We were trying to get to Italy by water. They caught us and brought us back. Now we are locked in prison.” Eventually, he was killed by guards, who fired into his cell during a fight between inmates.
For years, the E.U. has formally called for the closure of migrant prisons in Libya. (An E.U. spokesperson denied direct involvement in migrant detention in Libya, saying, “Our programs are intended to save lives, protect those in need, and fight trafficking in human beings and migrant smuggling.”) But Jeff Crisp, who from 2006 to 2013 was the head of policy development and evaluation at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.), said that these claims have “arguably not been serious,” since the E.U. also supports “the whole system of interception and return” that causes migrants to be brought to the prisons. Last year, the Libyan Coast Guard picked up and returned to the country more than thirty-two thousand migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, up from nearly twelve thousand in 2020, according to the U.N.’s migration agency. In the days after our investigation, Najla Mangoush, the foreign minister of Libya’s Government of National Unity, said that years of European money sent to bolster her country’s migration-enforcement actions had primarily served the E.U.’s agenda. “Please do not push the problem in our lap, and please don’t point your fingers at Libya and portray us as a country which abuses and disrespects refugees,” Mangoush said, at a conference promoted by the Italian government in December.
After our investigation was published, there was a flurry of international attention on the state of migrant detention in Libya. On January 13th, the Libyan authorities ordered the closing of Al Mabani—a development we found out only several weeks later, through the U.N.H.C.R. The move to shutter Libya’s most notorious migrant prison might be taken as progress. However, it is also an indication of the lack of accountability in the ways that migrants are handled in Libya. Detention centers are opened, closed, and reopened from one week to the next, and the migrants are shuttled between them. In 2019, Tajoura, a particularly infamous detention center, was decommissioned, only for its staff to be moved to Al Mabani, where severe abuses continued. The ever-shifting nature of these prisons and their lack of proper record-keeping help to insulate the abuse from scrutiny: each time detainees are relocated or a center closes and another one opens, it becomes more difficult for aid groups to track the migrants and to insure that they are not being sold into forced labor or otherwise trafficked.
The order to close Al Mabani also underscores the patronage system that passes for governance in Libya. Detention centers and the trafficking of detainees offer money-making opportunities, and militias vie for access, which is granted based on political connections. Militias with allies in the national agency that oversees migration in Libya, the Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration (D.C.I.M.), get more of these lucrative migrants sent to their facilities. A former director of the D.C.I.M., General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, was tied to the militia that ran Al Mabani. (We were not able to reach Abdel-Hafiz for comment.) As a result, much of the profitable flow of migrants went to his favored center. For reasons that remain unclear, Abdel-Hafiz was ousted from this job, in December. After the new director, Mohammed al-Khoja, took over the D.C.I.M., he did not move into its headquarters. According to an activist who runs a humanitarian group in Tripoli, al-Khoja instead manages the agency from Tariq al-Sikka, another prison in Tripoli that he ran. Most of the transferred detainees from Al Mabani seem to have wound up at Tariq al-Sikka, and at another detention center in the Libyan capital called Ain Zara. (The D.C.I.M. did not respond to requests for comment.)
Although Al Mabani has officially been closed, the humanitarian activist—who spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of concern for his safety—said that as many as fifty migrants are still being held at the site. “The local militia is using them in construction, maintenance, and for cleaning their military vehicles, and also for cleaning and maintaining their own homes and farms,” the activist said. Judith Sunderland, the associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said that her organization is concerned about this. “Anyone left in Al Mabani is now detained in an unofficial detention site, where there is no chance of any outside help,” she said. “If official centers are hellholes, unofficial centers are black holes where it’s even easier for people to be abused, exploited and disappeared.”
Observers fear that the official closing of Al Mabani could also mark the beginning of a broader effort by the Libyan government to move detention centers outside of Tripoli. There is not yet evidence that other centers will be moved, but the motivations to do so are clear. “Escapes by detainees would presumably be more difficult when the prison is in the middle of nowhere,” Crisp said. “Pestering from aid groups and journalists is also less likely, since the government more tightly limits movement outside the capital city.” The humanitarian activist said that fewer migrants are being disembarked in Tripoli, and that his organization is extremely concerned about the safety of those who are held elsewhere. “Almost all the landings take place to the west of the city of Al-Zawiya,” he said. “The D.C.I.M. says it is holding eight thousand people, but inside Tripoli the number is small, we do not believe that it exceeds two thousand.”
In January, the Outlaw Ocean Project detailed its investigation before the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights, outlining the E.U.’s role in filling Libya’s migrant-prison system. During the hearing, E.U. officials denied responsibility for abuses. “We are not funding the war against migrants,” Rosamaria Gili, the head of the Maghreb division at the European External Action Service, said. “We are trying to instill a culture of human rights.”
A week later, an E.U. official announced plans to provide five more vessels to the Libyan Coast Guard. More vessels mean more high-seas arrests—and more migrant detainees sent to prisons like Al Mabani or Tariq al-Sikka. Sunderland said, “What’s insane is that the European Union is propping up this monstrous business model by helping Libyan forces to intercept people at sea and take them back to these detention centers.”