‘Journey of hell’: Migrants in Libya endure torture, rape, forced labour

The United Nations has warned that migrants in Libya, including young girls, face the risk of being killed, tortured, raped, or forced into domestic slavery.

According to a UN Human Rights Office report released on Tuesday, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees are being forcibly abducted and jailed for long periods until they’re sold or kidnappers receive ransom from relatives.

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“They endure prolonged detention and are coerced through torture and inhumane treatment into paying for their release,” said the report titled “Business as Usual”.

The ⁠report is based on interviews with almost 100 migrants between January 2024 and November 2025, with interviewees both inside and outside Libya.

“These violations are executed through a business model – one that turns human mobility into a supply chain and human suffering into profit,” the report said.

“Detention has become a revenue stream within an exploitative, profit-driven system. Survival depends on payment. Those without money are passed along, sold, or erased.”

‘Journey of hell’

Libya has become a transit route for migrants from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa who are fleeing conflict and poverty and journeying ⁠across the Mediterranean to Europe since the 2011 fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi to a NATO-backed uprising. Factional conflict has split the country into rival western and eastern administrations since 2014.

In recent years, the European Union has supported and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, which returns migrants stopped at sea to detention centres, and funded Libyan border ‌management programmes.

Suki Nagra, the UN Human Rights representative for Libya, described the situation as extremely “dire”.

“We’re seeing waves of racist and xenophobic hate speech and attacks against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as interceptions at sea where people are brought back to Libya — which we do not consider a safe place for disembarkation and return,” she said.

The UN report cited an unnamed Eritrean woman detained for six weeks at a human trafficking ⁠home in Tobruk, in eastern Libya.

“I wish I died. It was a journey of hell. Different men raped me many times. Girls as young ⁠as 14 were raped daily,” she said. The perpetrators released her ⁠after her family paid a ransom.

A woman identified as Gloria from Nigeria was forced into marriage as a child at the age of 15. “People come there to buy people, to buy human beings. They forced me into prostitution. I stayed there for a long time before I ran away,” she said. 

The ‌report ‌emphasised the importance of life-saving search and rescue operations for migrants at sea, but urged the international community to halt returns to Libya until adequate human rights safeguards are ensured.