Libya: This Is What’s Happening In Migrant Detention Centres

Asgi.it – Here are the reasons given for the sentence issued on 10 October 2017 bu the Court of Milan, condemning a Somali citizen to life imprisonment on being held responsible for the extremely serious acts of violence committed in the first months of 2016 in a camp in Libya (see the statement of 11 October)

The testimony of the injured parties heard in court is appalling. People are held by force in the camp, which was managed, amongst others, by the person accused. Day by day, hundreds of people of all ages were subjected to torture, sexual abuse and demonstrative or plainly cruel murders, all of this in a climate of desperate resignation by the victims and of absolute impunity of the torturers.

It is worth taking the time to read at least a few pages of the sentence in order to realise the sheer horror in which hundreds of people are living these years in Libya’s detention centres. Such horror was recognised in the court sentence of an Italian judge.

The debate about policies to reduce the flows of migration cannot ignore this matter of fact: a politics which tries to prevent by any means the arrival of people from Libya in Italy equals condemning foreign citizens to remain in the same centres that have officially been recognised as places of torture and death.

Nobody can claim not to know.

Translation by Greta Pallaver