A medical charity, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says there are close to 6,000 migrants trapped in Libyan detention camps who should be evacuated to Europe “as soon as possible”.
Nigerians are among those migrants as hundreds of Nigerian nationals are reportedly trapped in Libya with some dead in the desert before they could make the tortuous journey to Libya.
The state of the Libya detention camps has been described as horrible and unfit for humans but the Libyan authorities appear less perturbed by the plight of these migrants.
Doctors Without Borders, known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in French, is an international humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation of French origin , best known for its projects in conflict zones and in countries affected by endemic diseases.
Human rights groups have repeatedly documented cases of abuse and torture in Libyan migrant prisons, and a two-month-old conflict around the capital Tripoli has worsened the situation.
“There are no safe places in Libya to take these migrants and refugees in order to remove them from the risk of conflict.
“This is why we are urgently calling for their humanitarian evacuation,” Sam Turner, MSF head of mission in Libya said on Tuesday.
“The situation remains very, very worrying and this has to stop as soon as possible; this human suffering is too high,” Julien Raickman, MSF head of mission in Misrata and Khoms, added.
MSF also called on EU states to stop supporting the Libyan coastguard, which intercepts migrants at sea and returns them to detention camps.
The migrants who need rescuing from detention are no more than 5,500-5,800, or about 1 per cent of the estimated total number of foreigners in Libya, Turner said.
Preempting European concerns about the risk of a mass inflow of asylum-seekers from Libya, he said the vast majority of migrants who live in the country have no plans to migrate to Europe.