The European Union is funding the Libyan coast guard to keep migrants out of Europe and detain them in a failed state—and that leaves them at the mercy of militias and human traffickers.

Since April, about 19 families, mostly Sudanese from Darfur, have been taking refuge in an improvised camp.

Many suffered human rights abuses, including beatings, extortion and rape during their time held in detention centres. Others risked being sold into slavery by traffickers and even death in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean or through being caught up in the ongoing fighting.

Rwanda has agreed to take in hundreds of African refugees and asylum-seekers held in detention centres in Libya under an agreement reached with the UN refugee agency and the African Union.

Migrants trapped in Libyan detention centres where many have been subjected to abuse would be evacuated to Rwanda under an emergency plan being discussed with international humanitarian agencies and the EU, The Financial Times has reported. 

Libya is to close three migrant and refugee detention centres after criticism from the UN over squalid conditions and inadequate food supplies.

A Libyan migrant detention centre which was hit by an airstrike two weeks ago, killing more than 50 people, is housing refugees again, according to reports.

A number of migrants in Libya have been moved to a detention centre in the capital that was hit with an airstrike earlier this month, despite a risk it could be hit again, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Friday.

Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda confirmed that it has initiated the necessary measures on the aerial bombardment of the immigrants’ centre of Tajoura, Tripoli.

Seven days after Haftar’s bombing of the migrant detention centre in Tajoura, killing 53 people, several migrants exited the facility and began a protest against the delay in their deportations.