Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Libya – including young boys and girls – are facing "systematic and widespread human rights violations" including torture and rape, according to a United Nations report published on Tuesday.

Since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi following a western-backed uprising in 2011, Libya, which is located just 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the Italian coast across the Mediterranean Sea, has become one of the main departure points in North Africa for migrants trying to reach Europe.

In recent years, the European Union has funded Libyan coastguard training and border management programs to prevent refugees from making the dangerous crossing.

Libya: UN report reveals human rights abuses

But Tuesday's UN report said migrants are often rounded up and abducted by criminal trafficking networks, some with ties to the Libyan authorities and networks abroad.

"They are separated from their families, arrested, and transferred to detention facilities without ​process, often at gunpoint, in what amounts to arbitrary detention," said Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesman for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, Switzerland.

The report, which is based on interviews with almost 100 people from 16 countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, covers a two-year period from January 2024 to December 2025 and describes cases of men being forced to work without pay ​or enough food, and of girls ⁠being separated from their mothers.

The document describes "a brutal and normalized reality" and denounces "an exploitative model" that preys on migrants' "heightened vulnerability."

It says that around 5,000 people being held in "official" centers after "illegal and dangerous interceptions at sea" are subject to "sexual and gender-based violence," "torture," "slavery" and "enforced disappearance."

'I wish I had died,' says Eritrean migrant

"[If] you have money, you pay your way out; or you are forced to work; or you risk it all and escape, then you face live bullets, and you may die,” a young South Sudanese man who managed to escape said.

One woman from Eritrea who was detained for two months at a trafficking house in Tobruk in eastern Libya said she was repeatedly raped by different men and that girls as young as 14 were raped on a daily basis. "I wish I had died," she said. "It was a journey through hell."

Suki Nagra, UN Human Rights representative at the UN mission in Libya, said women in the centers were subjected to "humiliating methods" including getting undressed in front of others before being publicly raped, tortured and beaten.

"To dismantle this highly exploitative model, urgent legal and policy reforms are required," the report urged, calling on the European Union and its member states to "establish a moratorium on all interceptions and returns to Libya until adequate human rights safeguards are ensured."

Edited by: Louis Oelofse

Author: Matt Ford, with dpa, AFP and Reuters

First published: February 17, 2026

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