UN report: Libya runs migrant detention as profit-sharing industry

A new UN-commissioned report on Libya’s treatment of migrants describes a system that looks less like a state “managing borders” and more like a franchised detention-and-extortion market, where armed groups, smugglers, and nominally official actors all take a cut.

According to Inter Press Service, the report warns abuses are escalating across Libya’s migrant routes and detention sites: arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, forced labour, and ransom demands imposed on people intercepted at sea or seized on land. The report argues that the brutality has been industrialised into a supply chain.

Libya’s fragmented governance makes the model easy to run. Different power centres control territory, checkpoints, ports, and detention facilities, while international actors keep outsourcing “migration management” to whoever can stop boats from leaving. When policy is measured in “departures prevented” rather than rights protected, the market selects for the providers most willing to use coercion.

The report, as summarised by IPS, highlights how migrants are routinely cycled through multiple hands: interception, confinement, sale or transfer to other groups, and extraction of money from families via ransom. Forced labour becomes both punishment and revenue stream. Smuggling networks aren’t a rival to the detention system; they are often its upstream supplier and downstream distributor. Vertical integration is a feature.

The international community’s preferred tool—funding training, equipment, and “capacity building” for Libyan authorities—doesn’t abolish the market. It subsidises it. If a militia can rebrand as a “coast guard unit” or “security directorate,” it can access resources, legitimacy, and a protective layer of diplomatic ambiguity. The UN can publish reports; the business model continues.

Libya’s migrant economy also exposes a broader European and UN habit: calling coercive border outsourcing “humanitarian” because the stated objective is to prevent drownings. Yet by making Libya the choke point, policy pushes migrants into more expensive routes, deeper debt, and greater dependence on intermediaries—exactly the conditions that increase exploitation.

The report argues that this is not a law-enforcement problem solvable by training and equipment. It’s a political-economy problem created by demand for migration, restrictions on legal entry, and the outsourcing of enforcement to actors whose comparative advantage is violence.

Libya did not accidentally become a “privatised prison system.” It was paid—directly or indirectly—to become one. And in markets, suppliers rarely abandon a profitable line of business out of moral persuasion.