It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. As we heard in the extremely powerful opening remarks from the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), there is incontrovertible evidence that slavery—that brutal and dehumanising exploitation—is taking place in Libya today.
As we know, modern slavery is shamefully common in our world and exists in our country. However, the images and words that have come out of Libya in recent weeks are shocking and have historical resonance: the victims are black Africans and the people who have enslaved them are not. The people who have been bought and sold in Libya have been violated in so many ways; they have experienced much violence and they have been betrayed and cheated at every step of their journey.
The personal stories make clear that the victims have paid, borrowing and scraping together money to start a journey to Europe because they believed an evil deception—but that was only the start of their exploitation. They are left utterly alone, terrified and without support in an unstable foreign country and under the control of people who care only about extracting every penny that they can from their “merchandise”. Foka, a Cameroonian, described the beatings he witnessed and endured at the hands of the traffickers, as he and others were cowed and forced to submit:
“There was torture like I’ve never seen. They hit you with wooden bats, with iron bars…They hang you from the ceiling by (your) arms and legs and then throw you down to the floor. They swing you and throw you against the wall, over and over again”.
Foka’s injuries were still visible when he made that statement.
The traffickers are not only exploiting young migrants through slave labour but making money from ransoms, as we have heard. Sometimes, to coerce a ransom payment, a migrant is forced to call a parent or relative and then beaten while the relative listens. The story of Victory, a young Nigerian man, is illustrative. First, he paid people smugglers, who lied and said they would get him to Europe. He then endured weeks of slave labour in Libya once he could no longer pay them, and he was then forced to find a ransom payment to set him free. His mother had to beg and borrow the money to save his life. Victory’s ransom was more than 1 million Nigerian naira, which would take 56 years to earn on the local minimum wage. Victory had already spent his life savings to pay the people who exploited him, and now his family may literally face a lifetime of debt while his exploiters continue to escape justice.
As we have heard, Mohammed Abdiker, of the United Nations migration agency, said that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face
“systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder…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 UN estimates that there are anything from 700,000 to 1 million migrants currently in Libya, with 70% from sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence shows that 30% of adults and 40% of children have been forced to work against their will. That is a massive number. So many people enslaved—so many children.
I would like the Government to outline what we are doing to stop the enslavement and sale of human beings in Libya and the trafficking of people towards the Mediterranean. I understand that France is to work with the UN’s sanctions committee for Libya to identify individuals or organisations involved in trading human beings. That committee can require UN member states to freeze assets owned or controlled by individuals on its list and can impose a travel ban. Does the Minister support that proposal, and will he work to ensure that that committee has all the information it needs?
Action against slave traders must be the priority; they have to be shut down. However, there is obviously a broader context. Large numbers of desperate people from sub-Saharan Africa are stuck in Libya. That was not their intended destination, and it is getting harder and harder for them to move on, partly because of the actions taken by our Government, in concert with many other European Governments, to make it harder for migrants to cross the Mediterranean.
Those actions have generally been taken with good intentions, motivated by a desire to shut down trafficking routes. However, shutting down the traffickers who run routes up and down the Mediterranean is clearly only half done at best; the terrible re-emergence of slavery in Libya is testament to and a consequence of that. If we want to reduce harm by closing those routes, that strategy cannot stop at the shores of north Africa—action needs to be taken in Libya and, equally, in countries to its south.
Social media is a critical tool for the perpetrators of modern slavery. It is how traffickers advertise, spread lies and recruit victims, and it enables them to run their amoral trade. Social media companies, whether they like it or not, have a role to play in disrupting this trade, and I hope the Minister will comment on any conversations he has had with those companies in his remarks.