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The images and videos that arrive almost every day on the cell phone of Michelangelo Severgnini are unbearable: They show refugees in Libya, chained together on the ground, poured over with molten metal and beaten dead.

Severgnini, a human rights activist from Italy, is regularly in contact with several hundred migrants via WhatsApp. It documents what the Europeans are suppressing or ignoring: the dehumanization of thousands of refugees in Libya, the break with civilization in the name of Europe.

The EU states have outsourced the migration defense to Libya. They pay criminal gangs and militias to prevent them from fleeing to Europe - by whatever means.

Organizations such as MSF have described many things that happen to refugees being picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard. They end up in detention centers, which were compared to concentration camps by the Federal Foreign Office. They are abused, raped, tortured, enslaved, executed. Former UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein speaks of "sheer horror".

All this does not prevent Europeans from cooperating with Libya in their asylum policies. The EU even increased its funds for Libyan "border guards" last year. Europe's leaders claim that the money would improve standards in Libya.

The opposite is the case: the living conditions for refugees in Libya continue to erode. According to reports by human rights activists, refugees are now also being used as soldiers in the civil war between the government and the warlord Khalifa Haftar, which constitutes a war crime.

What needs to happen now is clear:

  • The refugees have to be evacuated from Libya as a first step, as MSF has been demanding for a long time. They have to stay in camps in the region, but of course in Europe.
  • The EU program Eubam is over. Libya does not need a border guard but a peace mission.
  • The EU states, especially Italy, have to cease all payments to the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, as this money ends up largely with criminal militias who buy weapons for their war.
  • The EU should instead create legal channels for refugees to Europe, ie invest in resettlement programs, promote family reunification and grant humanitarian visas.

Europeans have shifted responsibility for refugees far too long to countries like Libya. They are complicit in the barbarism that happens there.