With no explanation from the government, fanfare from aid groups or national or foreign media coverage, Libya’s most notorious migrant prison, Al Mabani, officially closed on January 13, 2022.
In its approximately 12-month lifespan, the prison became an emblem of the irresponsibility of Libya’s wider detention system, where rape, extortion and murder were common and well documented.
Al Mabani was important to the world not only because the UN said that crimes against humanity were happening there, but also because its existence and growth were the result of EU policies aimed at preventing migrants from crossing the Mediterranean and reaching the shores. European.
In December of last year, The Outlaw Ocean Project, in collaboration with The New Yorker magazine and in partnership with Folha de S.Paulo in Brazil, it published an investigation into Al Mabani and the vast system of shadow detention that the EU helped create.
The report told the story of Aliou Candé, a climate refugee from Guinea-Bissau, who was arrested by the EU-funded Libyan Coast Guard while crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Italy. He was sent to Al Mabani and was killed by prison guards a few months later.
From a journalistic point of view, the closure of Al Mabani may seem like an achievement. A team of reporters exposed extensive abuses at the prison, and the government immediately shut the place down. But the more important story is less encouraging.
Al Mabani’s silent closure shows the ever-changing nature of incarceration in Libya and how this transience makes it nearly impossible to protect detainees.
Migrant detention centers open, close and reopen from one week to the next. Detainees are moved from place to place without any follow-up. Three thousand people are taken out of one prison and, mysteriously, only 2,500 get off the bus at the next prison. It takes months for those doing humanitarian work to get permission for regular visits to prisons like Al Mabani — only to have to start those negotiations all over again when those inmates are taken to a newly created prison.
The consequence is that militias can, with confidence in impunity, torture, detain and disappear refugees indefinitely.
The closure of Al Mabani also illustrates how power and governance really work in Libya. What determines how migrants are treated, where they are held, for how long and whether they are released has less to do with the law or humanitarian imperatives and more to do with protection and money.
Al Mabani was probably closed not because journalists revealed that guards there were involved in crimes such as the murder of Aliou Candé and the extortion and torture of many other migrants. It is more likely that Al Mabani was deactivated because of a political fight between two men vying for the direction of Libya’s Directorate to Combat Illegal Migration (DCIM), which manages the flow of captured migrants.
Detaining migrants in Libya is big business and for the detainees everything comes at a price: protection, food, medicine and, most expensive of all, freedom.
When General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz lost his leadership chair in the DCIM, Al Mabani prison, run by his favorite militia, went bankrupt. The day after Mabrouk lost his job, Al Mabani posted his latest Facebook post. When the new director, Mohammed al-Khoja, took over the DCIM, the lucrative flow of captive migrants was redirected to Al-Sikka Prison, the facility he previously managed. A UN spokeswoman confirmed that many of Al Mabani’s detainees were transferred to Al-Sikka. The winner gets the spoils.
The closure of Al Mabani is also part of a larger effort by the Libyan government to move official detention centers out of Tripoli. Jailbreaks are more difficult when the prison is in the middle of nowhere. Harassment from aid groups and journalists is also less likely, as the government more heavily limits movement outside the capital.
Opened in early 2021, Al Mabani — which in Arabic means “The Buildings” — was notoriously brutal. No journalists had ever entered the facility, but fugitive migrants recounted what happened there, occasionally backed up by cell phone footage.
The violence peaked in October 2021, with a mass shooting of migrants during an escape, a few days after authorities surrounded and arbitrarily detained up to 5,000 migrants from Gargaresh, a nearby community. “Some of our staff who witnessed this incident describe injured migrants in a pool of blood on the ground,” said Federico Soda, head of the International Organization for Migration’s Libya office. Six people were killed. Another two dozen were injured.
The pattern is clear. The militias run the detention centers for as long as they can, and then they are closed down when the agents in power change or the media sheds too much light on them. In the case at hand, Al Mabani was only created to get inmates out of another notoriously violent prison, Tajoura, after it began to draw a lot of attention.
Tajoura was bombed in 2019, and investigators revealed that among the dead migrants some had been forced to do military work, such as preparing weapons. “Closing individual centers or centralizing immigration detention does little to combat the systematic abuse of refugees and migrants, highlighting the need to root out the abusive detention system as a whole,” Amnesty International said in a 2021 report.
The European Union has been slow to take responsibility for its role. In January, the Outlaw Ocean Project presented details of its investigation to the European Parliament’s human rights committee and highlighted the EU’s broad support for Libya’s migration control apparatus. Representatives of the European Commission disagreed with our characterization of the crisis.
“We are not funding the war against migrants,” said Rosamaria Gili, director of the European External Action Service for Libya. “We’re trying to instill a culture of human rights.”
However, just a week later, Henrike Trautmann, representative of the European Commission, told lawmakers that the EU would provide five more ships to the Libyan Coast Guard to bolster its ability to intercept migrants on the high seas.
More ships means more arrests. Last year, more than 32,000 migrants were arrested by the Libyan Coast Guard and returned to the country’s migrant prisons. With additional EU support, that number is likely to increase in 2022. “We know that the Libyan context is far from ideal for this,” admitted Trautmann. “We think it’s still preferable to continue supporting this than to leave them to their own devices.”
Our reporting certainly played a role in closing Al Mabani. But the biggest lesson from this event concerns how patronage and protection pass for government in Libya, how this results in crimes against humanity, and how the EU continues to financially support these abuses through its support of the Libyan Coast Guard.
understand the series
This text is part of a series produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project, whose director is Ian Urbina, in partnership with sheet. The special examines the EU’s collaboration with Libya in detaining migrants trying to reach Europe. The Outlaw Ocean Project, a Washington-based non-profit journalistic organization, focuses on environmental and human rights issues that occur on the high seas.
