MIGRANTS, asylum-seekers and refugees in Libya are being rounded up at gunpoint, trafficked by criminal networks with ties to government authorities, and subjected to slavery, torture and sexual violence on an industrial scale, the United Nations said Wednesday in a damning new report.
The findings, released jointly by the UN Human Rights Office and the UN Support Mission in Libya, document two years of abuse stretching from January 2024 to December 2025, and paint a picture of a country where the exploitation of vulnerable people has become, in the UN’s own words, “business as usual.”
“There are no words to describe the never-ending nightmare these people are forced into, only to feed the mounting greed of traffickers and those in power profiting from a system of exploitation,” UN Human Rights Spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters in Geneva.
The report describes a sophisticated criminal ecosystem in which migrants are abducted by trafficking networks with documented ties to Libyan authorities and international criminal organisations. Victims are stripped from their families, detained without legal process and transferred to facilities — both official and unofficial — where they face forced labour, forced prostitution, ransom demands and torture.
Among the testimonies documented in the report is that of a Nigerian woman trafficked to Libya in 2021, who endured two years of forced sexual servitude in Tripoli before being moved to a household in Zuwara following a police raid, where she was then forced into domestic slavery without pay. She did not leave Libya until February 2025.
“A brutal and normalised reality,” the report concludes — one that preys systematically on people at their most vulnerable.
The abuse does not end on Libyan soil. The report details harrowing accounts of migrants attempting to cross the central Mediterranean, only to be intercepted by Libyan forces in operations involving dangerous manoeuvres, threats and excessive force. Those caught are forcibly returned to Libya, where they re-enter the same cycle of detention and abuse. The UN also condemns the routine practice of mass expulsions to third countries, conducted without individual case review, in violation of international law and the right to seek asylum.
The UN issued an urgent call Wednesday for the Libyan authorities to immediately release all arbitrarily detained migrants, end dangerous interception operations at sea and decriminalise irregular movement through the country.
Critically, the UN also directed its demands at Europe. Al-Kheetan urged the European Union and the broader international community to impose a moratorium on all interceptions and forced returns to Libya until credible human rights protections are in place — a pointed challenge to EU migration policies that have long relied on Libyan cooperation to stem crossings across the Mediterranean.
The full report is available through the UN Human Rights Office. Media inquiries may be directed to Thameen Al-Kheetan in Geneva at [email protected].
