Speaking in Brussels on Thursday 15 March, Vincent Cochetel, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) special envoy for the central Mediterranean said that the situation involving migrants trapped in Libya remains very worrying.
The member states are due to step up their efforts to resettle particularly vulnerable people from this region into the European Union, as a means of providing relief to Niger, which has taken in the majority of people that the UNHCR proposed to evacuate urgently in December 2017 (see EUROPE 11974).
Cochetel also said that, contrary to “what we might read, the number of migrants arriving in Libya has not declined” and that it is “very difficult to quantify the movements” of people with any precision.
Irrespective of the 15,000 emergency migrant evacuations from Libya to their countries of origin operated by the EU and the International Migration Organisation (IMO), the UNHCR has launched an emergency evacuation mechanism for 1,300 very vulnerable refugees. These people were sent to Niger in transit, which is providing shelter for them until they are resettled in the EU, Canada and the US. Only 55 people have been resettled in Europe and dozens of cases are still awaiting a decision.
Cochetel also provided an update on the detention centres in Libya and again highlighted the extremely hard conditions the migrants who have been trapped there are encountering. The Libyan authorities “gave their authorisation for the UNHCR” to open a "transit centre" soon for departures (to countries other than Libya), which will have a capacity for 1,000 places.
The UNHCR considers that this is an alternative to detention and an opportunity for getting to know the migrants better by way of more confidential and thoroughgoing interviews, particularly with regard to their real countries of origin.
According to the Special Envoy, evacuations and returns have certainly taken place over the past few months but this is not always to the migrants’ actual countries of origin. These returns have also sometimes failed to take into account the concerns of the interested parties. According to the UNHCR, Malians have thus been sent, for example, to Algeria, from whence they have immediately fled to Mauritania. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)