Melissa Pawson
On a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, a survivor tells of their detainment in Libya, which the EU helped to fund
The boat took us all by surprise that morning. It was spotted by a crew member on lookout on our top deck, and soon, what had been a pinpoint on the horizon quickly became a distinct wooden boat, tightly packed with people, all waving and shouting. No one was wearing a lifejacket.
The crew on our boat, Humanity 1, moved fast. I joined them on one of the lifeboats and watched as those being rescued clambered on board one by one – some laughing and smiling, others seemingly in a state of shock.
It felt like a toss of the dice that they’d been found by a German rescue vessel in the wide ocean of the central Mediterranean, one of the world’s deadliest sea crossings. They could just as easily have drowned or been picked up by the Libyan coastguard and sent to one of the country’s brutal detention centres.
This is a reality that one of the survivors, Omar*, knows all too well.
This rescue, in late November, was the seventh time the 18-year-old Egyptian had attempted to cross the Mediterranean in 2025.
On four of those attempts, Omar’s boat was stopped by the Libyan coastguard, while on another, in April, it was intercepted by the Tunisian coastguard, which “sold” those on board to Libyan authorities. Each time, Omar ended up being held in various Libyan detention centres, where he faced severe beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, overcrowding and extortion for ransoms.
On this latest attempt, Omar believes he only made it so far because his smuggler paid the Libyan coastguard to allow them passage. In his 11 months of trying and failing to leave Libya for Europe, he said he encountered a network of smugglers, police, militia and coastguard all connected through bribes and corruption – all while the European Union turned a blind eye, and even funded Libyan border agents.
Over the past decade, the EU has paid Libyan authorities hundreds of millions of euros to block migrant people from entering Europe on small boats departing from North Africa. An initiative led by Italy – the target destination for most of those who make the journey – has provided further funding and resources, including at least 14 patrol vessels.
The money comes after Italy ended its government-run search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean in 2014, after just one year, citing high costs and a lack of EU support. Since then, more than 22,775 people have died or gone missing on the route.
Civil rescue boats such as Humanity 1 have expanded their patrols of the waters in efforts to prevent loss of life, but are increasingly facing crackdowns from Libya, Italy and other European countries.
Libyan officials on board one of the Italian-donated boats opened fire on a rescue ship in international waters in August. Rights groups urged the EU to suspend funding for the country’s coastguard after the attack, which they said was part of a broader pattern of aggression towards people in distress at sea and rescue crews.
Instead, Italy and the EU have doubled down on their support for Libya’s migration tactics. This week, after we arrived in Italy carrying Omar and the other survivors, Humanity 1 was detained by Italian authorities for not communicating with the Libyan coastguard. The organisation operating the vessel, SOS Humanity, said it suspended communication due to the Libyan agency’s track record of rights abuses at sea.
Marc Tilley, an independent migration researcher focusing on North Africa and the central Mediterranean, told openDemocracy that the EU is looking to expand its support for migration management in Libya, and the UK hopes to join them.
“The UK and the EU are now holding bilateral meetings with [Libyan commander] Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya,” said Tilley. “This was the first exercise in legitimising eastern Libya [whose government is unrecognised] and recognising them as potential partners in their battle against migration.”
Held for ransom five times
In the six days we were both on board Humanity 1, I often spotted Omar listening to music and laughing with the other Egyptian and Somalian teenagers, the youngest of whom was just 15.
They could’ve been teenagers in any part of the world, except they happened to be on a rescue boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, having escaped a place notorious for torture, forced labour and mass killings.
When I approached Omar on the deck and asked to interview him, I told him that I would need his informed consent to publish his story. He started laughing. “We’re not used to being respected like this, we’re used to being beaten in Libya.”
In March 2023, Omar was on his lunch break at a construction site in Cairo when he heard that his 15-year-old cousin had drowned off the Tunisian coast.
Omar, then 16, had last spoken to his cousin the night before to wish him a safe trip. The two teenagers were living in poverty in the Egyptian capital, Omar said, and planned to travel together to Libya and then find a boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy in search of a better life.
In the end, though, Omar was refused boarding on the flight to Libya from Egypt. His cousin made the journey alone. “I would’ve died with him,” Omar said.
Less than two years later, Omar decided to try again. “I left Egypt to find a better life,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid by what happened to my cousin.”
He found a smuggler to help him travel overland to Libya in January of this year, where he initially planned to stay and work. He had been recruited over Facebook to work in a sweet shop for 14,000 Libyan dinars a month (£1,900), but when he arrived, he was told he would only be paid the equivalent of £275 a month.
“I was threatened when I asked for my rights. I was cheated out of my salary,” he said. “I couldn’t go home. I felt I had to continue.”
Omar said that each time he attempted the crossing and was intercepted and imprisoned, he was forced to contact family members in Libya or back home in Egypt to beg them to pay for his release, with the ransom demanded by Libyan authorities ranging from 2,000 Libyan dinars (£274) to 16,000 dinars (£2,195).
The longest Omar was held for was 37 days, in the notorious Bir al-Ghanam detention centre. In the end, his father flew to Libya to pay the ransom, which secured his release. On other occasions, he turned to his cousins also living in Libya to help him fund the funds to get out.
“We were 200 people crammed into a cell,” he said of his time in Bir al-Ghanam. “There was no room to even sit down. There were insects everywhere, and guards would come in at all times of the day to beat us with belts or throw water on us.”
He described how people in the cell would collapse onto each other because they were so weak from exhaustion and hunger.
“It was like that every time I was in prison,” said Omar. “But Bir al-Ghanam was the worst. I saw a lot of torture happening there. Some people had been there for over a year because they couldn’t afford the ransom.”
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Melissa Pawson is the editor for Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. She also works as a freelance journalist, covering migration, human rights and the climate crisis.
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