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Paul Kirby, Sexual violence in the border zone: the EU, the Women, Peace and Security agenda and carceral humanitarianism in Libya, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 5, September 2020, Pages 1209–1226, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa097
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Abstract
The last decades have seen a striking increase in international policy seeking to protect against conflict-related sexual violence. Norms of protection are, however, unevenly applied in practice. In this article, I address one such situation: the significant and growing evidence of widespread sexual violence at detention sites in Libya where migrants are imprisoned after interception on the Mediterranean Sea. Drawing on policy documents, human rights reports, interviews with advocates and officials, and an analysis of debates in the EU Parliament and UNHCR's humanitarian evacuation scheme in Libya, I examine how abuses have been framed, and with what effects. I argue that decisions about protection are shaped not only by raced and gendered categorizations but also by a demarcation of bodies in the border zone, where vulnerability is to some degree acknowledged, but agency and responsibility also disavowed by politicians, diplomats and practitioners. The wrong of sexual violence is thus both explicitly recognized but also re-articulated in ways that lessen the obligations of the same states and regional organizations that otherwise champion the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The combination of mass pullback and detention for many migrants with evacuation for a vulnerable few is an example of carceral humanitarianism, where ‘rescue’ often translates into confinement and abuse for unwelcome populations. My analysis highlights the importance of the positionality of migrants in the Libyan border zone for the form of recognition they are afforded, and the significant limits to the implementation of the EU's gender-responsive humanitarian policies in practice.
Sexual violence is today a major focus of humanitarian governance. Following decades of advocacy, perhaps most notably through the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, national governments, humanitarian agencies and civil society groups now frequently proclaim a keen interest in ‘gender’ as a vector of vulnerability, and produce detailed plans to protect relevantly gendered persons (usually interpreted as women) during war and in other ‘conflict-affected’ times and spaces. Attentiveness to gender results in technical guidelines for deciding who is at risk, and for distinguishing ‘gender-based’ violence from other harms. The classification of wronged bodies is a question not only of medical or anthropological expertise, but also of shared understandings of gender, justice and security expressed in political ideology, public argument and popular culture. Scholars have therefore been highly attentive to how gender is interpreted, produced and acted on in humanitarian and security practice. Critics have, for example, stressed the influence of binary and essentialist categorizations—military men as perpetrators, civilian women as victims—in producing misleading narratives and simplistic interventions.1
This article examines the politics of recognition in institutional responses to sexual and gender-based violence against imprisoned migrants in Libya.2 I argue that decisions about protection are shaped not only by raced and gendered categorizations, as is widely appreciated, but also by a demarcation of bodies in the border zone, where vulnerability is to some degree acknowledged, but agency and responsibility also disavowed by politicians, diplomats and practitioners. The EU's ongoing policy of ‘pullback’ containment—where those attempting to cross the Mediterranean are returned to Libya by force—increases the risk of sexual violence (and other abuses) against migrants.3 The existence of significant EU commitments on sexual and gender-based violence does not lead to substantive protection against these harms, and the outsourcing of gender-sensitive evaluations to humanitarian agencies offers escape only for some. Such protection teams as exist are severely limited in their ability to monitor detention conditions and rely on hasty categorizations of gendered vulnerability. The wrong of sexual violence is thus both explicitly recognized but also rearticulated in ways that lessen the obligations of the same states and regional organizations that otherwise champion a ‘gender perspective’. The positionality of migrants at different points of transit and confinement significantly affects how they are recognized in policy discourses.4 The apparent contradiction—at best partial alleviation of gendered harms that are the foreseeable result of policy—is a feature of carceral humanitarianism, the form of militarized ‘rescue’ that condemns unwelcome people to the detention centre and the permanent refugee camp.5
It is no novelty to claim that government policies articulate a particular image of their targets and beneficiaries. Advocates of frame analysis have shown how policy terminology embeds ‘conceptual prejudice’ in organizing information and privileging some interpretations over others.6 The depiction of the murder of a woman by her partner as an ‘honour killing’ evokes a different idea of the source of the problem and available solutions from that associated with a ‘crime of passion’.7 Frames include explicitly stated and recognizable policy domains—such as ‘violence against women and girls’ (VAWG)—and also less obvious narratives embedded in policy, such as the shared understanding of ‘innocent victimhood’, that underpins common approaches to trafficking and coerced abortion in the United States.8 A parallel strand of research has focused less on overarching policy frames than on the circulation of stereotyped images and tropes. Policies invoke a range of stylized figures with differing roles or ascribed characteristics, such as ‘the refugee’, ‘the illegal immigrant’, ‘the trafficker’, ‘the terrorist’ and ‘the humanitarian’, among many others.9 Though figures are frequently ambivalent and invested with contradictory and paradoxical meanings, they are not just abstract ideas.10 When codified into operational plans they can have profound effects. Institutions draw on figures in their everyday practices to distinguish victims from perpetrators, the deserving from the undeserving, the saveable from the damned. Within the asylum system, the expanded recognition of persecution on the basis of sexuality has generated new techniques for detecting and policing the ‘genuine’ sexual refugee.11 The recourse to stylized figures can also be motivated by a desire to make harms legible by presenting particular audiences with the stories of violence they expect to hear.12 Much critical scholarship has emphasized that those associated with masculinity are typically cast as threatening, and those associated with femininity as vulnerable.13 Yet the influence of such images need not be hegemonic, as a multiplicity of figures—the economic migrant, the worthy refugee, the innocent victim, the cultural alien—may coexist with and contradict each other.14
The EU is a complex supranational polity, and its foreign policy (or ‘external action’) operates alongside, and not always in alignment with, those of individual member governments.15 My focus is primarily on agreed texts issued by the EU Council of Ministers and the European Commission, positions expressed by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, and the activities of humanitarian agencies funded by the EU. Starting from a curiosity about the work done by different frames, I trace the interaction of anti-migration and anti-trafficking discourses with border policing, security assistance and a system of violent detention, extortion and deportation in Libya. The conditions of migrant detention have received little attention in the scholarly literature, which has mainly addressed the politics of abandonment and death at sea. I focus on sexual violence not because it is more significant than other abuses, but because it is widely accepted that protection against sexual violence has become the centrepiece of the WPS agenda, and it may therefore be expected that a major proponent of WPS such as the EU would be responsive to evidence of it.
My sources include human rights reports, investigations by UN missions and offices, internal EU documents, debates in the European Parliament, and eleven semi-structured interviews with human rights advocates, lawyers, gender experts and officials in the EU and UN system.16 As well as amplifying the already significant challenge to EU policy, I seek to contribute to several research agendas: on the ways in which sexual violence is recognized or obscured;17 on the role of gendered images and concepts in contemporary migration and refugee politics;18 on the implementation and practice of the WPS agenda;19 and on the contemporary operation of ‘humanitarian’ border control.20 I first review EU border policies towards Libya, highlighting the development of a policy of pullback and containment. I then describe the system of incarceration in Libya and summarize the evidence of sexual violence at official detention sites. A third section explores how responsibility for protection is disavowed through an analysis of debates on Libya in the European Parliament and of EU-funded humanitarian evacuations from Libya. A concluding discussion draws out the relevance of my argument for debates on the framing of gender violence, the dynamics of EU foreign policy and the implementation of the ‘gender perspective’ in conflict space.
Bodies at a distance
The existence of a migration crisis in Europe can hardly be denied, even though every element of the phrase—the bounds between ‘Europe’ and its exterior; the novelty and gravity of the crisis; the identity of those in crisis or seen as a crisis; and the implied origin point of the emergency—requires interrogation. As has been much documented, the reception of migrants in Europe is deeply shaped by gendered and racialized ideas of vulnerability and threat. The figure of the migrant is a vector for anxieties about underdevelopment, difference and perversion, frequently expressed in sexual terms.21 Young male migrants have been construed as malingering and sexually aggressive in popular media, where they are seen as shedding their deserving innocence.22 The ‘construct’ of the migrant is contested, as is the ascription of vulnerability to this figure in concrete situations. This is so even where consensus seems assured, as for the corpse of Alan Kurdi, the image of which acted as a lightning rod for solidaristic sentiment but was also used to justify new anti-migration measures in Europe's border deal with Turkey.23 Though the EU has been a haven for some fleeing persecution and is today held up as a liberal bulwark against authoritarian populism (including within its own member states), its response to contemporary migrant and refugee movements has been defined by extra-territorialization, outsourcing and ‘remote control’.24 The result is a deep contradiction at the heart of ‘normative power Europe’, as techniques of bordering have been reconstituted and in some respects extended.25
In so far as the ‘migrant crisis’ refers to those fleeing war and poverty in parts of the Middle East and Africa, two transit routes have predominated: one through Turkey, the other across the Mediterranean, with much of the heaviest traffic leaving Libya for Italy and Malta on Europe's southern shores.26 The Libyan perimeter had already been significantly incorporated into the European border regime before the 2011 uprising against Muammar Gaddafi through a succession of agreements between the Italian and Libyan governments from the late 1990s onwards.27 The extension of European security politics into Libya was just one strand in a project of bordering at a distance, increasingly pre-emptive: ‘The primary objective of border control as a security technology is preventing the unwanted or not-yet-wanted from arriving in the territory of the Union.’28 This effort—often referred to as the externalization of refugee policy—incorporated countries on Europe's periphery into a security logic determined by the priorities of intra-European integration.29 European bordering accomplishes a kind of sovereign ventriloquism, whereby the dissolution of internal European frontiers coincides with the projection of Europe's edge into other sovereign and quasi-sovereign borderlands, which become its outer barricade.
The extension of the EU border zone in the Mediterranean has proceeded through a jurisdictional reorganization of the sea and a containment strategy that outsources confinement and deportation to the presumptive Libyan authorities, which receive significant training, resources and tactical assistance. Early quasi-humanitarian responses such as Mare Nostrum were replaced by more aggressive operations from late 2014 onwards, with lethal effects.30 Decreases in crossings were accompanied by a drastic deterioration in the rate of survival, from one death for every 42 arrivals in Europe from Libya in 2017 to one death for every 14 arrivals in 2018.31 In the same period, Italian and Libyan authorities acted to frustrate search-and-rescue efforts in the Mediterranean through legally dubious ‘codes of conduct’ restricting NGO access to Libyan waters and seriously undermining their operations.32 Migrants not rescued by NGO ships are seized and returned by the Libyan Coast Guard (a ‘pullback’, as distinct from earlier ‘pushbacks’ when European forces disembarked migrants directly in Libya).33
Though forced returns are not new, their scope has grown.34 Between 10,000 and 20,000 people attempting the Mediterranean crossing are intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard each year.35 Interdiction at sea translates into mass detention on land, as those who might have been recognized as asylum-seekers according to criteria used in Europe are instead criminalized and imprisoned. With the caveat that any extrapolation over time must be provisional, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) officials have estimated that in 2019 half of all returnees, overwhelmingly east and north African, were detained.36 Immigrant detention in Libya is classified as ‘arbitrary’ under international law owing to its indefinite character and the absence of review.37 Such prohibitions on arbitrary arrest as exist in law are frequently not respected, even for citizens.38 There is a broad consensus that detention in Libya is contrary to basic rights, especially for black African migrants who face widespread racism.39 Libya is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and recognizes only nine nationalities as potentially protected from deportation, and even they are not immune from detention.40 Though Libya was expected to ratify the convention following the detente of the mid-2000s, it has not yet done so, and has still not formally recognized the UNHCR.41
It is therefore well understood that forcible return to Libya poses significant risks of abuse for all irregular migrants, and not just political refugees who might in turn be repatriated.42 The European Court of Human Rights ruled decisively in 2012 that Italian operations to intercept migrants at sea were in violation of the non-refoulement principle, which forbids the return of persons to countries where they are likely to face persecution.43 Consistent with the wider European externalization strategy, collaboration with whatever Libyan authorities exist amounts to a kind of ‘neo-refoulement’, ‘preventing the possibility of asylum through a new form of forced return … to transit countries or regions of origin before they reach the sovereign territory in which they could make a claim’.44 Though EU policy is officially that the Libyan authorities should end indefinite detention, its persistence does not endanger the partnership. Pullback containment is therefore exceptional in a double sense: at odds with the professed values of Europe but also licensed as a necessary break with liberal order.45
Seasons in hell46
Neo-refoulement has as its corollary a vast carceral project. The Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) is nominally in charge of a network of detention sites where migrants are held indefinitely and in conditions that have been repeatedly described as ‘inhuman’.47 The vast majority of those in detention were imprisoned following return by the Libyan Coast Guard.48 There is chronic confusion over the number of official detention centres; the sum total varies with the state of conflict, as areas fall in and out of Tripoli's control, and with the criteria for inclusion. At any given point between 2017 and 2019, anything between 5,000 and 20,000 migrants were detained in official DCIM facilities.49 Even on lower estimates, it is clear that migrant detention has expanded steadily, at least up to the outbreak of new hostilities in April 2019, from the hundreds or low thousands detained countrywide in the mid-2000s to 2,500 in 2014 and around 5,000 in the reduced areas of government control more recently.50 Sites may be disbanded, or large sections of the imprisoned population ejected, with little notice, whether because of a deteriorating security situation or because their detention is no longer profitable for those operating the sites.51 The overall number of migrants coerced back to Libya and imprisoned also obviously depends on the numbers seeking to cross the Mediterranean in any period. Yet recent survey evidence indicates that the proportion of migrants imprisoned has increased since early 2017, despite significant fluctuations, as would be expected from a policy of forced return.52 In addition to the DCIM facilities that are in theory open to monitoring, there are numerous other detention sites across Libya in the control of militias and rival political forces. The command of the recognized government is so minimal that the UN panel of experts concluded that in effect no true ‘national security forces’ exist at all.53
A growing catalogue of evidence affirms that sexual and gender-based violence against migrants moving through, detained in or seeking to escape Libya is ‘normal’, ‘commonplace’ and ‘so widespread that it affected almost all migrant and refugee women’.54 Sexual violence occurs at border crossings;55 in transit as ‘payment’ to smugglers;56 as a feature of torture for extortion,57 when it is often filmed;58 as an element of forced labour;59 as coerced sex and sexual slavery;60 and in street harassment fuelled by anti-black racism.61 For instance, in focus groups with over 50 migrants and refugees convened by one women's rights NGO, only a handful of respondents said they had not experienced sexual violence, and then only because they had been able to pay for protection.62 Interviews with 125 individuals rescued by Médecins Sans Frontières revealed that practically every one of them had witnessed violence perpetrated against others in Libya, including sexual violence.63 And in a recent survey of over 5,100 migrants in Libya, those who had been detained reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence at over three times the rate of those who had not.64
Given the lack of facilities, the grave security situation, poor oversight and the absence of limits on detention in Libya, imprisonment is radically unsuitable for survivors of sexual violence, torture, forced labour and other human rights violations.65 Moreover, official detention facilities are themselves major sites of sexual and gender-based violence, and significant nodes in a network of abuse. As might be expected from the informality and mutability of incarceration in Libya and the infiltration of militias into formal state institutions, survivors sometimes have difficulty differentiating between official and non-official detention. Perpetrators operate in ‘connection houses’ where people are held between transit and detention, in buildings controlled by local gangs and paramilitary groups and in private homes.66 But despite the significant challenges in documenting abuses, human rights advocates are clear that sexual and gender-based violence has occurred in DCIM detention facilities.67 Multiple public reports detail the vulnerability of women to abuse and rape by guards,68 leading in some cases to pregnancy and death from forced abortion,69 and to the practice of sexual torture at detention sites.70 Leaked internal EU assessments likewise cite evidence of abuse, slavery, forced prostitution and torture in DCIM detention.71 Extensive analysis by UN missions and agencies have found reports of rape and sexual violence in detention, including sexual slavery rings overseen by guards, to be credible.72 Torture in detention has been described as systematic, and encompasses rape and sexual violence against both men and women as tools to humiliate or extract ‘confessions’.73 Clear evidence existed from at least as far back as 2015 that there was a pattern of sexual violence against migrants at official facilities, linked to broader practices of coerced labour, extortion and the normalization of violence and abuse.74 Human rights organizations reported regularly raising sexual and gender-based violence in official detention among other harms in high-level advocacy with the EU over a period of years, for example in biannual meetings between civil society groups and officials from EUNAVFOR-MED.75 Gender experts who investigated abuses describe their shock at discovering the lack of action: ‘Everyone knew how horrific these detention centres were in Libya and no one was doing anything about them whatsoever.’76
In short, there is little doubt that violence against migrants in detention is ubiquitous, recurrent and brutal, and that it frequently takes a sexualized or gendered form.77 Some interview respondents commented that the prevalence and gravity of sexual violence in Libya was among the worst they had encountered.78 Exploitation and abuse are not merely opportunistic, but integral to an extensive and longstanding trafficking–detention–extortion complex.79 Torture in official detention is recorded and communicated to the families of the detained, who pay anything from a few hundred to ten thousand dollars to secure their release.80 Detention sites are far more than staging points for deportation, and often detention does not result in return to a country of origin at all. Many official DCIM camps are known to be operated by militias, and even those sites more clearly in the control of the DCIM lack oversight from headquarters.81 As one Eritrean refugee succinctly expressed it: ‘The policeman is a smuggler, and the smuggler is a policeman.’82
Humanitarian disavowal
The extreme violence experienced in detention, fuelled over years by interdiction and pullback, suggests a pervasive failure to recognize gendered vulnerability. Yet the EU has repeatedly committed itself to advancing protections against sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, as have many of its member states. Reams of council conclusions, action plans and declarations record the Union's pledges to the WPS agenda.83 From the very first iteration of the EU's WPS strategy, migration and asylum were explicitly recognized as domains where it would take effect.84 According to the latest mandate, ‘the WPS Agenda is to be given effect in all EU external action’ and a promise is made to ‘mainstream gender perspectives as a key strategy … throughout all relevant policy frameworks’, with migration picked out as a special priority.85 The EU's WPS approach incorporates gender-sensitive ‘protection of refugees, internally displaced people, stateless people and asylum-seekers’ across both domestic and foreign policy.86 The 2008 commitment to ‘integrate WPS issues in its political and policy dialogue’ with partner governments, and to mainstream gender in all policies,87 might have been expected to make the EU especially sensitive to allegations of abuse in Libyan prisons. Moreover, at the time of writing 25 EU member states, including Italy, have national action plans on WPS, many of which include commitments on protecting refugees.88
In WPS discourse, the figure of the refugee—and particularly the refugee woman—is marked by a range of gendered vulnerabilities which governments and international organizations are expected to anticipate and alleviate. Though the thematic resolutions passed by the UN Security Council—conventionally taken as the fundamental doctrine of WPS—may be read as expressing different versions of the agenda depending on their sponsor and content, the refugee camp or settlement has from the start been included as a specific geography where the gender perspective should be applied.89 The protection of refugees has arguably become more central over time, with one of the latest resolutions stressing that ‘displaced persons face specific, heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence’.90 In the language of the Council, states and their regional organizations are continually urged to recognize and respond to the female refugee as a woman at risk. The twelve EU states which are either permanent members of the Council or have served terms on it since 2011 have regularly received briefings from the UN secretary-general on sexual violence against displaced and imprisoned populations in Libya.91
Yet the record of EU WPS policy in Libya suggests that the figure of the survivor of sexual violence, or the refugee woman at risk of sexual violence, does not prompt robust protective action in the border zone. EU officials confirmed that there has been no attempt to include WPS commitments within Libya policy.92 Bureaucratic politics, and a lack of understanding of gender issues on the part of officials with country briefs, are reported to have closed off possibilities for collaboration, as has the relative marginality of the Principal Advisor on Gender and UNSCR 1325 within the External Action Service.93 As Aiko Holvikivi and Audrey Reeves have argued, once the ‘conflict-affected woman’ leaves the war zone, she also crosses a boundary of recognition.94 Current articulations of WPS are ill-equipped to track movement across different geographies of insecurity, or to recognize how anti-smuggling, forced return and related measures can exacerbate or generate new gendered harms. It is not only those figures not readily legible as victims (such as men subjected to sexualized torture in detention) who are failed by policy, but the foundational WPS figure herself, the ‘woman-in-conflict’, whose visibility and value decline in transit corridors and hinterlands.95
The neglect of sexual violence and other abuses against detained migrants in EU policy is sustained by the framing of the crisis in terms of ‘human trafficking’, where pullback and containment are understood not as exacerbating vulnerability so much as disrupting criminality and therefore ultimately benefiting migrant populations. The position of a conflict-affected person on the move, for example in a rubber dinghy at sea, subjects them to competing logics of punishment and assistance.96 A significant body of scholarship has analysed the ways in which the anti-trafficking frame and related security discourses authorize departures from human rights, asylum and protection standards.97 In the practice of EU bordering that has received most attention, ‘human rights justify maritime intervention; rescue/interdiction is undertaken in their name’.98 But the Mediterranean is just one province in the zone of containment. The humanitarianism of interdiction—a war on smugglers which returns migrants to a situation of profound insecurity—is in Libya supplemented by the humanitarian salve of evacuation from detention, though only for some.
An analysis of debates on Libya in the European Parliament over the past decade illustrates the dominance of the anti-trafficking frame over alternatives. A simple content analysis reveals only nine mentions of sexual and gender-based violence across all debates since 2010, one predating the Libyan revolution, and another referring to violence carried out during the revolution.99 In the remaining seven mentions, some MEPs, mainly from Social Democrat and Green radical groupings, foregrounded vulnerability both as a gendered risk and one associated with migrant status, drawing a direct link between the EU's pushback policy and violations in detention sites.100 But the dominant theme in speeches by EU parliamentarians on Libya was trafficking, identifying Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, criminal networks or militias not associated with the recognized Libyan government as the sources of danger to migrants. Vastly outnumbering the nine mentions of sexual and gender-based violence, there were over 170 references to trafficking in the same period.101
The trafficking framing was also evident in parliamentary responses given by Federica Mogherini, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security from 2014 to 2019, and her deputies. Gender violence does not appear explicitly in Mogherini's replies to internal critics of EU policy, which tend instead to rearticulate the question as one of an intrinsically Libyan tragedy that EU policy seeks to repair. The conditions in detention are not disputed, indeed are admitted to include ‘unthinkable violations of human rights’,102 against which the EU works to ‘save … people from the detention centres’ and registers its success in the thousands who have been released.103 EU foreign policy is thus consistently presented as securing the evacuation of the detained, without mentioning either the pushback/pullback project that so often led to their detention or the numbers still imprisoned. In these dialogues refugees and migrants are framed as at risk, caught in tragic situations, but nevertheless as beneficiaries of EU action and funding.104 Strikingly, in no debate did the High Representative invoke the EU's commitment to WPS.105 Across all parliamentary debates on Libya analysed, there were no explicit mentions of the agenda, and only three references to women's rights or gender equality, all as criticisms of the Gaddafi regime or its immediate successor.106
Evidence from within the policy process and public statements indicate not so much that the WPS agenda has been co-opted or instrumentalized (as advocates often fear) as that it has barely been present in deliberations at all.107 This should not be taken to mean that the EU has ignored gender altogether. Instead, officials maintain that the EU approach is consistent with human rights and gender equality values, citing as evidence its funding of UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).108 Official EU strategy claims to mitigate vulnerability in Libya by strengthening protection, promoting social integration for migrants, supporting voluntary return, and offering emergency resettlement for the most vulnerable.109 To those ends, between late 2015 and the end of 2019, €408 million was allocated from the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa to projects in Libya, the bulk of them for ‘migration management’, with other sums allocated to enabling repatriation and resettlement.110 The primary mechanism for protection is the UNHCR humanitarian evacuation scheme, through which the most vulnerable asylum-seekers are prioritized for resettlement, often via Niger and now also Rwanda. EU funds have also allowed the IOM to maintain a voluntary repatriation scheme, which has assisted tens of thousands of migrants to leave Libya, not all of whom were held in immigration detention.111 These programmes have been characterized as ‘deporting people on behalf of the Libyan authorities, free of charge’.112 Protection of the figure of the vulnerable migrant is outsourced in a mirror of sovereign ventriloquism, a bureaucratic process of appointing partners, operating at a distance.
In the work of the Emergency Transit Mechanism, ‘vulnerability’ is established by UNHCR protection monitoring teams who register asylum-seekers, carry out interviews and select individuals for evacuation.113 In principle, gender is incorporated in assessments of previous experiences of torture and violence, risk of exploitation, youth, sexual orientation and other metrics. In practice, the process is bedevilled by operational limitations. Respondents repeatedly emphasized the restrictions on the UNHCR's access to detention centres, though they differed on how comprehensive registration has been. There is no regular pattern of visits to detention sites, and each visit may allow for interviews with only a handful of detainees, or no interviews at all.114 Overcrowding, disease, abuse and corruption in detention centres all undermine the ability of migrants to disclose their experiences, and of interviewers to record them accurately. UNHCR staff therefore of necessity resort to epistemological ‘triage’, assessing likely vulnerability on the basis of broad demographic characteristics like age or sex: ‘We're really not able to talk to the thousand 25-year-old men and identify which are the fifty that we're going to be able to prioritize based on their specific needs.’115
It is impossible to verify vulnerability assessments independently, and both critics and supporters of the UNHCR's work acknowledged that in many conditions even basic screening is not feasible.116 Though ‘gender is very much at the top of the list’ on paper, it is likely that many who do not fit simplified criteria of gendered (or other) vulnerability—such as men who have experienced sexualized torture in detention—have not been interviewed at all.117 Internal EU assessments confirm the existence of ‘critical operational constraints that undermine the capacity of aid actors to fully comply with humanitarian principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality, with the Do no harm imperative as well as with Core Humanitarian Standards’.118 As one respondent commented: ‘The peculiar thing about Libya is that all of this stuff is out the window. Everything about Sphere standards and humanitarian standards of care, everything about protection … I've never seen a situation like that … It's just somehow, Libya and the Libyan situation is exceptional. Or exceptionalized such that “Oh, we can't apply all our normal standards there, and we can't be expected to.”’119
The outsourcing of protection allows officials to claim that policy is responsive to gender without having to implement WPS commitments proactively. The ‘gender perspective’ is thus limited to a deeply compromised and partial form of rescue, leaving detention and abuse as the presumed status quo for the majority of migrants. The larger logic of containment is untroubled. The combination of care and control is fundamental to carceral humanitarianism: ‘Detention centers and refugee camps are part and parcel of a system … that turns refugees into criminals and charity cases simultaneously, which, in turn, becomes the troubling justification for “rescuing” them in order to lock them up or lock them in.’120 Though the UNHCR programme has some benefits over no ameliorative action at all, evacuations are clearly insufficient, considered in relation to the scale of harm.121 Progress in removing people from detention is undercut by pullbacks that increase the incarcerated population. At the same time, a lack of resettlement spaces sharply limits opportunities for exit. In the first three months of 2020, just 289 vulnerable persons were evacuated, of whom no more than 92 were categorized as ‘sexual and gender-based violence’ or ‘women at risk’ cases, out of a current population of 48,626 UNHCR-registered refugees or asylum-seekers in Libya.122 By the end of 2019, an EU-funded ‘gathering and departure facility’ had become so overcrowded that migrants were offered cash payments to leave; it was later abandoned for fear that it would be targeted by belligerents.123 At the time of writing, the intensification of conflict has left agencies less able than ever to monitor abuses, as detention sites are abandoned or seized by competing factions.
Conclusion
The consolidation of an EU border zone, its boundaries set by EU-led anti-trafficking missions and the rescue-and-forced-return operations of the Libyan Coast Guard, has exacerbated the crisis faced by migrants and asylum-seekers within Libya. Despite a clear basis for recognizing and responding to sexual and gender-based violence (among many other human rights violations), EU policy has largely outsourced responsibility for protecting detainees from those harms, even as pullbacks continue to feed a complex of extortion and abuse. The border constitutes not just a geographical limit, but also a zone of recognition and disavowal. This situation poses a deep challenge to claims of gender equality and concern for migrants made on behalf of normative power Europe, and also carries implications for several related areas of research and advocacy.
First, in respect of the recognition of gendered harms, I have sought to show how migrants are framed differentially depending on their position in the conflict space. Whether a figure is seen as deserving of protection or refuge is mediated by policies and operational codes brought to bear in differentiated geopolitical zones. The subject of protection is positional. A figure in transit—such as ‘the conflict-affected woman’ or ‘the refugee boy’—will occupy more than one position in the humanitarian imagination during her or his journey, and there are material consequences that follow from how these individuals are categorized. The effects of a changing frame of recognition can be highly specific, and subject to modification or reversal by other frames, as when the revelation that slave markets were operating in Libya prompted mass protests in France and a special session of the UN Security Council called by President Emmanuel Macron.124
Second, for analysts of EU foreign policy, I have documented how recent policies of remote control have created a situation which increases the risk of sexual violence against migrants in Libya. Though the pushback/pullback policy may also result in abuses perpetrated by criminal networks or militias, the degree of responsibility is most pronounced for violence committed at official detention sites under the nominal control of the recognized government. Despite widespread reports of violence and calls for an end to interdiction and detention, the policy has persisted. Support for humanitarian evacuation and other resettlement programmes and the provision of additional training for the Libyan Coast Guard are inadequate to overturn the fundamentally unjust and dangerous detention regime, and may be regarded as integrated elements of the carceral humanitarian ‘solution’ to the migration crisis. My analysis accords with the findings of previous research that the EU applies gender equality selectively in its external affairs.125 Furthermore, it underscores the need for ongoing scrutiny of how broad trends—such as securitization or externalization—are manifested when foreign policy imperatives conflict.
Third, for observers of the WPS agenda, this study chimes with others that caution against excessive reliance on the neat texts of action plans and strategies. Though the EU has in many ways been a proponent of WPS, and though sexual and gender-based violence are the most visible issues within that agenda, the application of these commitments to a material situation of gendered vulnerability in Europe's border zone has in practice been extremely limited, even in the narrow terms of humanitarian evacuation, and thus remains largely ‘protection on paper’. Despite much debate among scholars and advocates on the relative attention given to sexual violence in the agenda, this ‘hypervisibility’ has not much influenced the course of EU externalization strategies. The Libyan case underscores the need to examine how the agenda is applied in border zones, along migrant routes and in conflict spaces where other policies may override it. As the agenda gains ever more traction, it is all the more important to document the multiplicity of practices in which it is affirmed, reconstructed or undermined.
Footnotes
For a sample, see Chiseche Salome Mibenge, Sex and international tribunals: the erasure of gender from the war narrative (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, Sexual violence as a weapon of war? Perceptions, prescriptions, problems in the Congo and beyond (London: Zed, 2013). The lagged recognition of men and boys as survivors of sexual violence has received perhaps the most attention; on this, see Sandesh Sivakumaran, ‘Lost in translation: UN responses to sexual violence against men and boys in situations of armed conflict’, International Review of the Red Cross 92: 877, 2010, pp. 259–77; the contributions to Marysia Zalewski, Paula Drummond, Elisabeth Prugl and Maria Stern, eds, Sexual violence against men in global politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); and Philipp Schulz, ‘Displacement from gendered personhood: sexual violence and masculinities in northern Uganda’, International Affairs 94: 5, Sept. 2018, pp. 1101–20.
I use ‘migrant’ in the widest sense to refer to all persons moving across international borders with the purpose of settling for some period outside their country of origin, regardless of the motive for movement or the legal recognition afforded it. A refugee is defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention as anyone outside their country of origin with a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’, and I use the term in this sense here. An asylum-seeker is a person seeking recognition as a refugee. For a discussion, see Roger Zetter, ‘More labels, fewer refugees: remaking the refugee label in an era of globalization’, Journal of Refugee Studies 20: 2, 2007, pp. 172–92.
The border—and border detention—may also be read historically and comparatively as a site of sexual violence. See Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, ‘Sexual violence and the border: colonial genealogies of US and Australian immigration detention regimes’, Social and Legal Studies, publ. online April 2018, pp. 1–14, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0964663918767954. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 24 May 2020.)
See the closely related argument in Aiko Holvikivi and Audrey Reeves, ‘Women, Peace and Security after Europe's “refugee crisis”’, European Journal of International Security 5: 2, 2020, pp. 135–54.
Kelly Oliver, Carceral humanitarianism: logics of refugee detention (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
See Celeste Montoya, From global to grassroots: the European Union, transnational advocacy, and combating violence against women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 14.
The example is borrowed from Meghana Nayak, Who is worthy of protection? Gender-based asylum and US immigration politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 16. See also Montoya, From global to grassroots, p. 17; Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Seductions of the “honor crime”’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22: 1, 2011, pp. 17–63.
Nayak, Who is worthy of protection?, pp. 102–36.
For an analysis of one such figure, see Fadi Saleh, ‘Queer/humanitarian visibility: the emergence of the figure of the suffering Syrian gay refugee’, Middle East Critique 29: 1, 2020, pp. 47–67.
On plural figures and the relationship between ‘figures’ and ‘figuration’, see Cynthia Weber, Queer International Relations: sovereignty, sexuality, and the will to knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 24–33.
See Eddie Bruce-Jones, ‘Death zones, comfort zones: queering the refugee question’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 22: 1, 2015, pp. 101–27.
See e.g. Sam Cook, ‘The “woman-in-conflict” at the UN Security Council: a subject of practice’, International Affairs 92: 2, March 2016, pp. 353–72.
Nadine El-Enany, ‘The EU asylum, immigration and border control regimes: including and excluding the “deserving migrant”’, European Journal of Social Security 15: 2, 2013, pp. 171–86; Harriet Gray and Anja K. Franck, ‘Refugees as/at risk: the gendered and racialized underpinnings of securitization in British media narratives’, Security Dialogue 50: 3, 2019, pp. 275–91.
On the uses of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’, see Heaven Crawley and Dimitris Skleparis, ‘Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe's “migration crisis”’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44: 1, 2017, pp. 48–64.
A complexity highlighted by others: see Roberta Guerrina, Laura Chappell and Katharine A. M. Wright, ‘Transforming CSDP? Feminist triangles and gender regimes’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56: 5, 2018, p. 1040.
Interviews were conducted remotely between Sept. 2019 and April 2020. Interviewees were selected on the basis of their involvement with investigations into migrant detention conditions in Libya or their role in developing or implementing EU policy. For consistency, I refer to all interviewees by descriptions of their role, rather than by name, even where individuals waived anonymity.
See e.g. Nayanika Mookerjee, ‘“Remembering to forget”: public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 2, 2006, pp. 433–50.
See e.g. Billy Holzberg, Kristina Kolbe and Rafal Zaborowski, ‘Figures of crisis: the delineation of (un)-deserving refugees in the German media’, Sociology 52: 3, 2018, pp. 534–50.
See e.g. Nadine Ansorge and Toni Haastrup, ‘Gender and the EU's support for security sector reform in fragile contexts’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56: 5, 2018, pp. 1127–43.
See e.g. Polly Pallister-Wilkins, ‘The humanitarian politics of European border policing: Frontex and border police in Evros’, International Political Sociology 9: 1, 2015, pp. 53–69.
Weber, Queer International Relations, pp. 72–91; Eithne Luibhéid, ‘Sexuality, migration, and the shifting line between legal and illegal status’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14: 2–3, 2008, pp. 289–315.
Lesley Pruitt, Helen Berents and Gayle Munro, ‘Gender and age in the construction of male youth in the European migration “crisis”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43: 4, 2018, pp. 687–709; Billy Holzberg and Priya Raghavan, ‘Securing the nation through the politics of sexual violence: tracing resonances between Delhi and Cologne’, International Affairs 96: 5, pp. 1189–1208.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen and Lene Hansen, ‘Images, emotions, and international politics: the death of Alan Kurdi’, Review of International Studies 46: 1, 2020, pp. 75–95.
For an overview of terms, see David Scott FitzGerald, ‘Remote control of migration: theorizing territoriality, shared coercion, and deterrence’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46: 1, 2020, pp. 4–22. For the history of these border strategies, see Luiza Bialasiewicz, ‘Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of EUrope: Libya and EU border work in the Mediterranean’, Geopolitics 17: 4, 2012, pp. 843–66; Rutvica Andrijasevic, ‘Deported: the right to asylum at EU's external border of Italy and Libya’, International Migration 48: 1, 2010, pp. 148–74.
A key element of this contradiction is an image of cosmopolitan regional order that effaces imperial history. See Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘The current crisis of Europe: refugees, colonialism, and the limits of cosmopolitanism’, European Law Journal 23: 5, 2017, pp. 395–405.
According to figures published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2,081,789 people, whether ultimately classified as migrants or refugees, arrived in Europe via Mediterranean routes, by land or sea, between 2014 and Dec. 2019. For the latest data, see https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean. Within that period, there were notable changes: arrivals in Italy by sea rose from 153,842 in 2015 to 181,436 in 2016 before dipping to 119,369 in 2017 and collapsing to 23,370 in 2018 and 11,471 in 2019. See UNHCR, ‘Italy: sea arrivals dashboard’ for Dec. 2018 and Dec. 2019, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205. In recent years, greater numbers have been arriving in Spain than in Italy.
Sara Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation on migration: a raw deal for refugees and migrants?’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21: 1, 2008, pp. 32–5; Alison Gerard and Sharon Pickering, ‘Gender, securitization and transit: refugee women and the journey to the EU’, Journal of Refugee Studies 27: 3, 2013, pp. 341–52.
Jef Huysmans, The politics of insecurity: fear, migration and asylum in the EU (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 96.
Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation’, p. 20; Gerard and Pickering, ‘Gender, securitization and transit’, pp. 340–41; Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz, ‘Another brick in the wall? Neo-refoulement and the externalization of asylum by Australia and Europe’, Government and Opposition 43: 2, 2008, pp. 249–69. On integration and externalization, see Emma Haddad, ‘The external dimension of EU refugee policy: a new approach to asylum?’, Government and Opposition 43: 2, 2008, pp. 190–205; Eiko Thielemann and Nadine El-Enany, ‘Refugee protection as a collective action problem: is the EU shirking its responsibilities?’, European Security 19: 2, 2010, pp. 209–29.
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Border displacements: challenging the politics of rescue between Mare Nostrum and Triton’, Migration Studies 4: 1, 2016, pp. 1–19.
UNHCR, Desperate journeys: refugees and migrants arriving in Europe and at Europe's borders, January–December 2018 (Geneva, Jan. 2019), pp. 10, 32.
Omer Shatz and Juan Branco, Communication to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court pursuant to Article 15 of the Rome Statute: EU migration policies in the central Mediterranean and Libya (2014–2019) (June 2019), pp. 49, 83; Amnesty International, Libya's dark web of collusion: abuses against Europe-bound refugees and migrants (London, Dec. 2017), p. 37. Italy's code, according to which signatories agreed to restrict their operations, was issued in July 2017; Libya's new search-and-rescue zone policy forbidding entry to NGO vessels followed in Aug. 2017.
Annick Pijnenburg, ‘From Italian pushbacks to Libyan pullbacks: is Hirsi 2.0 in the making in Strasbourg?’, European Journal of Migration and Law 20: 4, 2018, pp. 396–426. For details on an incident now pending before the European Court of Human Rights, see Forensic Oceanography, Mare Clausum: Italy and the EU's undeclared operation to stem migration across the Mediterranean (London, May 2018).
On the precursors to pullback, see El-Enany, ‘The EU asylum, immigration and border control regimes’, p. 183; and Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation’.
Since 2017 the UNHCR and its partners have tracked disembarkations. There are no comparable data from the preceding period. Over 15,000 returns by the Libyan Coast Guard were documented in both 2017 and 2018, and over 9,000 people were returned in 2019. Interceptions in the first four months of 2020 were almost three times higher than in the same period the preceding year. See UNHCR, Libya: activities at disembarkation, monthly update (Geneva, April 2020), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/76075; UNHCR, Libya: activities at disembarkation, monthly update (Geneva, Dec. 2019), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/73284; UNHCR, Libya: activities at disembarkation, monthly update (Geneva, Dec. 2018), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/67499; UNHCR, Libya: activities at disembarkation, monthly update (Geneva, Dec. 2017), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/61535. Other estimates are higher: the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that 20,335 migrants were intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard in 2017: see Maritime update, Libyan coast, 29 November–29 December (Geneva, Jan. 2018), https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/situation_reports/file/Libya_SR_20171129-20171229.pdf.
Charlie Yaxley, Twitter post, 4 Dec. 2019, https://twitter.com/yaxle/status/1202176633031008256.
This point is made continuously by human rights groups: see e.g. Human Rights Watch (HRW), No escape from hell: EU policies contribute to abuse of migrants in Libya (New York, Jan. 2019), p. 2.
European External Action Service (EEAS), EUBAM Libya initial mapping report: executive summary, 5616/17 (Brussels, 25 Jan. 2017), p. 25.
See e.g. Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation’, p. 27; IOM, Migrants caught in crisis: the IOM experience in Libya, (Geneva, April 2012), p. 18; Amnesty International, Seeking safety, finding fear: refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants in Libya and Malta (London, Dec. 2010), p. 7; Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’: stories of abduction, sexual violence and abuse from migrants and refugees (London, May 2015), pp. 24–5; Arezo Malakooti, The political economy of migrant detention in Libya: understanding the players and the business models (Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, April 2019), p. 20.
Amnesty International, Libya's dark web, pp. 13, 20–21, 29. Only persons with these nationalities—recently expanded from a list of seven—can be registered by the UNHCR: author interview, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
Bialasiewicz, ‘Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of EUrope’, p. 858; HRW, No escape from hell, p. 31. The lack of recognition of the UNHCR is not new: see Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation’, p. 25.
Pijnenburg, ‘From Italian pushbacks to Libyan pullbacks’, p. 401.
See Maarten den Heijer, ‘Reflections on refoulement and collective expulsion in the Hirsi case’, International Journal of Refugee Law 25: 2, 2013, pp. 265–90.
Hyndman and Mountz, ‘Another brick in the wall?’, p. 250. This strategy has also been called ‘refoulement by proxy’. See Forensic Oceanography, Mare Clausum, p. 7; also Bialasiewicz, ‘Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of EUrope’.
On detention and exception see Sheila Nair, ‘Sovereignty, security, and migrants: making bare life’, in Shampa Biswas and Sheila Nair, eds, International Relations and states of exception: margins, peripheries, and excluded bodies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), and Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15: 1, 2003, pp. 11–40. Although I am not able to explore them here, there are also parallels between the proliferation of detention camps at Europe's border zones and imperial histories of confinement. See Laleh Khalili, Time in the shadows: confinement in counterinsurgencies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
References to hell abound in refugee testimony regarding detention in Libya. See e.g. HRW, No escape from hell, pp. 1, 35; Amnesty International, Libya's dark web, pp. 22, 58; Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’: abuses against refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya (Washington DC, June 2017), p. 8; UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) and Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Desperate and dangerous: report on the human rights situation of migrants and refugees in Libya (Geneva, 20 Dec. 2018), p. 26.
UNHCR, Desperate journeys, p. 17. The same term is used in UNSMIL and OHCHR, ‘Detained and dehumanised’: report on human rights abuses against migrants in Libya (Geneva, 13 Dec. 2016), p. 1. See also Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, pp. 7–8; HRW, EU/NATO: Europe's plan endangers foreigners in Libya (New York, 6 July 2016), https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/06/eu/nato-europes-plan-endangers-foreigners-libya.
Author interview, human rights lawyer, 30 March 2020. Registrations happen not at disembarkation but through later visits to the official detention sites: author interviews, human rights lawyer, 26 March 2020; UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
The higher estimate is from Amnesty International, Libya's dark web, p. 7, drawing on DCIM figures from around Nov. 2017, when almost 15,000 refugees were found in captivity in the city of Sabratha and transferred to official detention. See also UNHCR, Flash update Libya, 27 Oct.–2 Nov. 2017, https://www.refworld.org/country,,UNHCR,UNHCRUPDATE,LBY,,5a0985194,0.html. The lower estimate is from HRW, No escape from hell, p. 6.
Cf. UNHCR, Libya crisis: UNHCR regional update 1–7 September 2014, https://www.refworld.org/country,,UNHCR,,LBY,,541939204,0.html; UNCHR, Libya update, 15–21 December 2018, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/67407. In 2016 a joint report from UNSMIL and the OHCHR estimated the detained population as between 4,000 and 7,000 across 24 centres. See UNSMIL and OHCHR, ‘Detained and dehumanised’, p. 13. The mid-2000s figure, from before the collapse of the Libyan state, is from Hamood, ‘EU–Libya cooperation’, p. 26. Estimates are compromised by lack of access to semi-official detention sites controlled by militia. See EEAS, EUBAM Libya initial mapping report, p. 37.
Author interview, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
Mixed Migration Centre, What makes refugees and migrants vulnerable to detention in Libya? A microlevel study of the determinants of detention (Geneva, Dec. 2019), p. 14.
UN Security Council (UNSC), Final report of the Panel of Experts on Libya established pursuant to Resolution 1973, S/2017/466 (New York, 1 June 2017), pp. 40–41. See also EEAS, EUBAM Libya initial mapping report, pp. 15–17; Malakooti, The political economy of migrant detention in Libya, p. 6.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’: sexual violence against men and boys on the central Mediterranean route to Italy (New York, March 2019), pp. 19, 2; Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 11.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 35.
Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 12.
Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’, pp. 15–16.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 24.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 28; HRW, EU/NATO.
Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 12.
Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’, p. 25. Though my focus is here on conditions in Libya, it is worth emphasizing that sexual violence also occurs on arrival in Europe, for example as an element of survival sex by destitute migrants in Italy. See Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 37.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 19.
Médecins Sans Frontières, Turning a blind eye: how Europe ignores the consequences of outsourced migration management (Barcelona, Nov. 2015), p. 12.
Mixed Migration Centre, What makes refugees and migrants vulnerable?, p. 20. Though this finding does not indicate that sexual violence was experienced in official detention, it emphasizes that those detained have specific protection needs which cannot be met under existing conditions.
UNSMIL and OHCHR, Desperate and dangerous, pp. 5–6.
Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 17; UNSMIL and OHCHR, ‘Detained and dehumanised’, pp. 15–18, 21–2.
See HRW, No escape from hell, p. 2; Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 2; Médecins Sans Frontières, Turning a blind eye, p. 10. All those interviewed agreed without reservation that grave abuses, including sexual violence, were common in official detention.
Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’, p. 5; Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 11.
Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 11; Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’, p. 21.
Médecins Sans Frontières, Turning a blind eye, p. 9, p. 10; HRW, EU/NATO.
EEAS, EUBAM Libya initial mapping report, p. 37; see also Malakooti, The political economy of migrant detention in Libya, p. 8.
UNSMIL and OHCHR, Desperate and dangerous, p. 46.
OHCHR and UNSMIL, Abuse behind bars: arbitrary and unlawful detention in Libya (Geneva, April 2018), pp. 28–30, 35–7.
See e.g. Human Rights Council, Investigation by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Libya: detailed findings, A/HRC/31/CRP.3 (New York, 15 Feb. 2016), p. 69.
Author interviews, human rights advocates, 1 Oct. 2019, 18 Oct. 2019, 30 March 2020. EUNAVFOR-MED is the EU naval operation targeting smuggling vessels, training the Libyan Coast Guard and enforcing the UN arms embargo off Libya.
Author interview, gender consultant, 31 March 2020.
One persistent difficulty is in disentangling ‘sexual violence’ from reported acts of torture that often have a sexual dimension, but which may not be disclosed or experienced as primarily sexual. See Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’, p. 20, and, for a broader discussion, Harriet Gray and Maria Stern, ‘Risky dis/entanglements: torture and sexual violence in conflict’, European Journal of International Relations 25: 4, 2019, pp. 1035–58.
Author interview, human rights advocate, 11 Sept. 2019.
Malakooti, The political economy of migrant detention in Libya.
Amnesty International, ‘Libya is full of cruelty’, p. 23; on the communication of sounds and images of torture, see esp. Women's Refugee Commission, ‘More than one million pains’.
Amnesty International, Libya's dark web, p. 27; EEAS, EUBAM Libya initial mapping report, pp. 17, 38.
Cited in Refugees International, ‘Hell on earth’, p. 5.
For a partial history of the EU's WPS work, see Roberta Guerrina and Katharine A. M. Wright, ‘Gendering normative power Europe: lessons of the WPS agenda’, International Affairs 92: 2, March 2016, pp. 293–312.
Council of the European Union, Comprehensive approach to the EU implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820 on Women, Peace and Security, 15671/1/08 (Brussels, 1 Dec. 2008), p. 26.
Council of the European Union, Women, peace and security: Council conclusions, 15086/18 (Brussels, 10 Dec. 2018), p. 3, p. 16 (emphasis added).
Council of the European Union, Women, peace and security, p. 21.
Council of the European Union, Comprehensive approach to the EU implementation, p. 11. As David and Guerrina point out, the centrality of gender equality to the EU's constitutional order plausibly suggests that it should be ‘a powerful values actor and indeed a norm entrepreneur’: Maxine David and Roberta Guerrina, ‘Gender and European external relations: dominant discourses and unintended consequences of gender mainstreaming’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 39, 2013, p. 56.
One of the six key areas of action in Italy's 2010 plan was ‘protecting the human rights of women, children and other vulnerable groups either fleeing armed conflict or living in conflict and post-conflict areas (including in refugee camps) and strengthening women's participation in peace processes’: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National action plan of Italy on ‘women, peace and security’ 2010–2013 (Rome, 23 Dec. 2010), p. 15 (emphasis added). Subsequent Italian plans have mentioned refugees less often.
See UNSC Resolution 1325, 31 Oct. 2000, p. 3; UNSC Resolution 1889, 5 Oct. 2009, p. 4. On the inadequacy of WPS policies with regard to refugees, see Aiko Holvikivi and Audrey Reeves, The WPS agenda and the ‘refugee crisis’: missing connections and missed opportunities in Europe, working paper no. 6 (London: LSE Centre for Women Peace and Security, 2017).
UNSC Resolution 2467, 23 April 2019, p. 9.
The use of sexual violence by official and paramilitary forces was documented on an almost annual basis, with the DCIM and specific detention facilities named in 2018. See UNSC, Report of the Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence, S/2018/250 (New York, 23 March 2018), pp. 14–15. Specific ‘protection measures to mitigate the risk of sexual violence in the context of immigration detention’ had been demanded the previous year: UNSC, Report of the Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence, S/2017/249 (New York, 15 April 2017), p. 14.
Author interviews, EU Libya desk and WPS officials, 17 Oct. 2019, 20 March 2020.
Author interview, EU WPS official, 20 March 2020. See also Guerrina et al., ‘Transforming CSDP?’, pp. 1045–6.
Holvikivi and Reeves, The WPS agenda; see also Cook, ‘The “woman-in-conflict” at the UN Security Council’.
Holvikivi and Reeves, ‘Women, Peace and Security after Europe's “refugee crisis”’.
This ‘positional’ effect has most often been commented on in relation to arrival in Europe. See Pallister-Wilkins, ‘The humanitarian politics of European border policing’, p. 54, and Tazzioli, ‘Border displacements’, p. 9.
See e.g. Huysmans, The politics of insecurity; Hyndman and Mountz, ‘Another brick in the wall?’; Violeta Moreno-Lax, ‘The EU humanitarian border and the securitization of human rights: the “rescue-through-interdiction/rescue-without-protection” paradigm’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56: 1, 2018, pp. 119–40.
Moreno-Lax, ‘The EU humanitarian border and the securitization of human rights’, p. 131.
Statements were documented using the text analysis software NVivo 12. A stemmed search for terms commonly used to refer to sexual and gender-based violence was run on the full text of 17 debates in the European Parliament between 2010 and 2019 where ‘Libya’ was included in the debate field in parliamentary records. Where debates included interventions in languages other than English, these were translated using the Google Translate function. The relevant terms were: ‘sexual violence’, ‘rape’, ‘sexual torture’, ‘sexual abuse’, ‘sexual exploitation’, ‘gender violence’ and ‘gender-based violence’.
See e.g. Marina Albiol Guzmán, MEP, ‘Situation of migrants in Libya’, P8_CRE-REV(2017)12-12(16), 12 Dec. 2017.
For this node, the stemmed search terms were ‘trafficking’, ‘human trafficking’, ‘smuggling’ and ‘criminal’.
‘Situation of migrants in Libya’, P8_CRE-REV(2017)12-12(16), 12 Dec. 2017.
Federica Mogherini, ‘Recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission/High Representative on Libya’, P8_CRE-REV(2018)05-29(17), 29 May 2018. See also Federica Mogherini, ‘The emergency situation in Libya and the Mediterranean’, P8_CRE-REV(2018)09-11(18), 11 Sept. 2018.
See e.g. Mogherini, ‘The emergency situation in Libya and the Mediterranean’.
This contrasts with the High Representative's statements elsewhere in favour of the WPS agenda: see e.g. EEAS, ‘Women, Peace and Security: there is no lasting peace if half of society is excluded from it, Mogherini says’, 3 July 2019, https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/64969/women-peace-and-security-there-no-lasting-peace-if-half-society-excluded-it-mogherini-says_hr.
The exact search terms used to code for WPS were ‘Women, Peace and Security’, ‘WPS’, ‘gender equality’, ‘women's rights’, ‘Resolution 1325’, ‘Resolution 1820’, ‘Resolution 1888’, ‘Resolution 1889’, ‘Resolution 1960’, ‘Resolution 2106’, ‘Resolution 2122’, ‘Resolution 2242’, ‘Resolution 2467’ and ‘National Action Plan’.
One exception may be the appointment of a Human Rights and Gender Adviser to the EU Border Assistance Mission in February 2018, although it does not appear that this role has yet had any impact on DCIM detention conditions.
Author interview, EU Libya desk official, 17 Oct. 2019. See also European External Action Service, Strategic review on EUNAVFOR MED Operation Sophia, EUBAM Libya and EU Liaison and Planning cell, 11471/18 (Brussels, July 2018), p. 15.
European Commission, Joint communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council: migration on the Mediterranean route: managing flows, saving lives (Brussels, 25 Jan. 2017), p. 10.
EU Emergency Trust Fund, ‘EU support on migration in Libya: EU Trust Fund for Africa—North of Africa window’, Dec. 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/sites/euetfa/files/eutf-factsheet_libya_dec_2019_1.pdf. Over €235.2 million has been assigned to projects with ‘migration management’ in their titles, with €104.8 million for measures encompassing protection and emergency assistance. Approximately 50% of the North of Africa budget of the Trust Fund has been spent on Libya, and the Fund at large is heavily weighted towards anti-trafficking, migrant return and border management. See EU Trust Fund for Africa Factsheet, https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/sites/euetfa/files/facsheet_eutf_long_online_publication_05-09-2019.pdf.
HRW, No escape from hell, p. 31. IOM, ‘More than 50,000 migrants benefited from voluntary humanitarian assistance from Libya since 2015’, 27 Feb. 2020, https://www.iom.int/news/more-50000-migrants-benefited-voluntary-humanitarian-return-assistance-libya-2015.
HRW, No escape from hell, p. 32.
Author interview, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
Author interviews, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020; human rights lawyers, 26 March 2020, 30 March 2020; gender expert, 6 April 2020.
Author interview, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
Author interviews, human rights lawyer, 26 March 2020; UNHCR official, 5 April 2020.
Author interview, UNHCR official, 5 April 2020. For example, several respondents took questions about gender vulnerability to mean the evacuation of women.
EU Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing the Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa, Managing mixed migration flows: enhancing protection and assistance for those in need in Libya, T05-EUTF-NOA-LY-08, 2019, p. 10.
Author interview, gender expert, 6 April 2020. ‘Sphere standards’ are principles and good practice for humanitarian response.
Oliver, Carceral humanitarianism, p. 6. On relations of care and control, see Pallister-Wilkins, ‘The humanitarian politics of European border policing’.
Author interviews, human rights advocates and lawyers, 1 Oct. 2019, 18 Oct. 2019, 26 March 2020, 30 March 2020.
Vulnerability categorizations cannot always be clearly mapped from month to month. For example, as of March 2020, the category of ‘survival of violence and torture’ has been disaggregated into ‘torture’ and ‘sexual and gender-based violence’. The figures cited here include all those in the ‘survival and torture’ category for January and February. See UNHCR, ‘Durable solutions factsheet’, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/dataviz/110,12 Feb. 2020; UNHCR, ‘Evacuation factsheet’, 12 Feb. 2020, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/dataviz/111; UNHCR, Libya: key figures, 31 March 2020, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/75122.
See Samy Magdy, ‘UN tries to cut numbers at EU-funded migrant center in Libya’, Associated Press, 30 Nov. 2019, https://apnews.com/e4c68dae65a84c519253f69c817a58ec.
See João Gabriell, ‘“Free our brothers!”: on the politicization of slavery in Libya within the French context’, South Atlantic Quarterly 118: 3, 2019, pp. 686–93.
David and Guerrina, ‘Gender and European external relations’.
Author notes
*This article is part of the special section in the September 2020 issue of International Affairs on ‘Sexual violence in the wrong(ed) bodies: moving beyond the gender binary in International Relations’, guest-edited by Paula Drumond, Elizabeth Mesok and Marysia Zalewski. I am grateful to Natasha Tsangarides, Myriam Fotou and Maurice Stierl for indispensable comments and guidance, and to Sophie Harman, Laura Barber and Laleh Khalili for advice on elite interviewing. The research for this piece was supported by the Gender, Justice and Security Hub, funded by UK Research and Innovation's Global Challenges Research Fund.
