I am grateful for the intervention. I will be interested to hear from the Minister on we can do to work towards democratic elections, and to create a mainstream Government in Libya, which clearly has not had one for many years. It is only by having a mainstream, democratically elected Government that we will be able to have a long-term view, whichever party makes up that Government. It will not necessarily
be for us to pick a horse, run the country or tell it what to do, but we can help support it. We can work with the African Union and a local offering to help Libya create its own destiny and future, which hopefully will be much safer and a lot more secure.
Let me get back to SC. He was bought, and then brought to his first prison. The IOM said it was
“a private home where more than 100 migrants were held as hostages. He said the kidnappers made the migrants call their families back home, and often suffered beatings while on the phone so that their family members could hear them being tortured. In order to be released from this first house, SC was asked to pay…about $480…which he couldn’t raise. He was then ‘bought’ by another Libyan, who brought him to a bigger house—where a new price was set for his release…about $970…to be paid via Western Union or MoneyGram to someone called ‘Alhadji Balde’, said to be in Ghana.
SC managed to get some money from his family via mobile phone and then agreed to work as an interpreter for the kidnappers, to avoid further beatings. He described dreadful sanitary conditions, and food offered only once per day. Some migrants who couldn’t pay were reportedly killed, or left to starve to death.
SC told IOM that when somebody died or was released, kidnappers returned to the market to ‘buy’ more migrants to replace them. Women, too, were ‘bought’ by private individuals—Libyans, according to this witness—and brought to homes where they were forced to be sex slaves.”
It was Nima Elbagir and CNN’s groundbreaking report, and those pictures, that really brought the situation home to so many people in the west. CNN heard from its contact that two auctions were going on at the same time. Some people in the Libyan Government would say that those things happen only sporadically, but on this occasion there were two at the same time, and the one that was filmed was an overflow auction, because there were so many people to be sold. There was also a big buyer in town wanting to buy people—that is what I said: “buy people”—as commodities or merchandise, to work on farms. It is atrocious, and while I am speaking I am reflecting on the words I use. That episode brought the matter home. Officers from the International Organisation for Migration said:
“What we know is that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder. Last year we learned 14 migrants died in a single month in one of those locations, just from disease and malnutrition. We are hearing about mass graves in the desert.”
The total population of migrants in Libya, based on estimates provided by embassies, is about 750,000, mainly coming from Egypt, Niger, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Syria and Mali. Previously, under the Gaddafi regime, there were about 1.1 million; I think that that was the estimate. They were predominantly there as cheap labour. Of the 750,000 who are there now, about 450,000 at least do not see Libya as their final destination. They see it as being on a migration route to Europe and beyond. Those are the people in connection houses, who have been trafficked. They are the people who are beaten and whipped with wires—hundreds of thousands of people. They experience extreme insecurity in Libya, including arbitrary arrest by non-state actors, detention for indefinite periods of time, bonded labour, harassment and general exploitation.
There were other pictures on CNN of not the auction but the detention centres. That aspect of the matter is of huge concern, and I want to ask the Minister for his views. The people held there share small mattresses, and
are effectively in a cage. That brings me back to what I said when I began my speech: they are treated worse than animals. How can we have reached a situation where that is anywhere close to the case?
The 450,000 people who come through Libya, seeing it as part of their migration route, go to the north coast, to a crossing point, pay another trafficker to get them into a boat, and go predominantly to Italy—to Lampedusa, a small island that simply cannot cope. I went, as a member of the Council of Europe, to Lesbos, to see some of the hotspots there where the Syrian refugees come from. There were a number of north Africans there and some were protesting and throwing things at the bus I was on, wondering why the Syrians were getting preferential treatment. Having seen what they go through to get there, it is possible to understand their concern.
We need to look at how the Italy-Libya deal is framed. I understand that it is a bilateral arrangement supported by the EU, but that it is being contested in the Libyan courts by human rights organisations based in Libya. I want to ask the Minister how robust the memorandum of understanding between the countries is, when there are reports of Libyan coastguards taking bribes to release migrants to traffickers. A second question leads on from that. The Department for International Development is doing fantastic work, as it tends to do. It is a world leader in the aid and support it gives. However, it is supporting more than 20,000 emergency interventions, involving healthcare, psycho-social support, hygiene kits and safe shelter. Can we be sure that we have robust accountability, to ensure that any support we give is not being fed into and supporting the cycle of trafficking, and that it is focused absolutely on the things I have specified?
It is good to hear that the IOM has managed to up its repatriation flights. The target originally was for 1,000 people a month to be taken back to their place of origin; that has gone up, and it is expected that 15,000 people will be repatriated to their original country this month alone. That is a good sign of the direction in which things are going.
I wonder whether DFID can get involved, either directly or through leverage of support from elsewhere, in trying to get accurate numbers. Together with the power vacuum, a problem that hampers what is being done is the fact that no one really knows the extent of the problem. There is work using various methodologies, but there is more to be done to get accuracy. Can we, for example, build up a phone network so that families from around the relevant part of sub-Saharan Africa can report in and talk about their loved ones—where they are, what has happened, the last time they saw them, and so on—so that we can begin to get more accurate figures?
Of course the UK Government will have a competing agenda. We want accountability, clearly, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) says, there is a need for stability and preparation for elections; we need to give support on the route towards elections, to get rid of the power vacuum. It is only a question of enforcement—everyone knows that slavery is illegal already, and there is nothing to be done to change the rule, but someone is needed on the ground to arrest the people in question and hold them to account, bringing them to court and applying the full
force of the law to them. If, for any number of reasons, there is no one on the ground to do that at the moment, it will not happen.