The Outlaw Ocean Project: The Migration Crisis off the Coast of Libya

Ian Urbina will be discussing the current migration crisis in Libya, based largely off his recent investigation in The New Yorker. The E.U., led by Italy, has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard to serve as a proxy maritime force, whose central purpose is to stop migrants from reaching European shores. Efficient and brutal, the at-sea capture and on land internment of these migrants is what European Union officials hail as part of a successful partnership with Libya in their “humanitarian rescue” efforts across the Mediterranean. But the true intent of this joint campaign, according to many human rights advocates, legal experts and members of the European Parliament, is less to save migrants from drowning than to stop them from reaching European shores. Once captured by the Libyan Coast Guard, tens of thousands of these migrants are then delivered into a dozen or so detention centers run by militias. The E.U. has also denied directly funding the migrant prisons in Libya, while consistently both conceding their cruel conditions and calling for improvements. But it has resisted calls to date to end its work with Libya and take steps to rescue those caught up in the country’s migrant jails.