Rights Groups Say Child Migrants Will Suffer from EU's Libya Plan
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Rights groups Friday attacked EU plans to help Libya stem migrant departures as a recipe for children being sent back to squalid detention centers in the north African country.
At a summit in Malta, leaders of the bloc were expected to approve a new strategy to "break the business model" of traffickers who have helped more than half a million mainly African migrants enter the European Union via Libya and Italy in the last three years.
NGOs said it would mean women and children being returned to inhumane conditions in detention centers where they would be vulnerable to rape, beatings, forced labor and forcible repatriation to uncertain fates in their home countries.
"Sending children back to a country many have described as a living hell is not a solution," said Ester Asin of British charity Save the Children.
The cornerstone of the plan is funding and training the Libyan coastguard to make it better able to intercept migrant boats before they reach international waters, according to a draft statement seen by AFP.
With Libya in a chaotic, conflict-scarred state and a fledgling UN-backed national unity government only in control of sections of the country's vast coastline, the prospect of turning boats around is causing concern.
Human Rights Watch said the EU would be flouting its international obligations by "outsourcing responsibility" for the migrants to one party to a conflict in a fundamentally unstable state.
"What the EU wants to call a 'line of protection' could in reality be an ever-deeper line of cruelty in the sand and at sea," said the rights monitor's Judith Sunderland.
