The raid by the uniformed Libyan security forces came out of the blue. On Wednesday morning, officers stormed into a coffeeshop in the coastal town of Zuwara, near the Tunisian border, where a group of migrants was waiting for potential employers. The men were rounded up, and some were subsequently arrested and taken away, apparently at random.
Michael Shira, a 19-year-old from Nigeria who was also in the cafe that morning, was lucky enough to avoid arrest. "But we live in constant fear," he told DW. "The Libyan authorities are currently arresting migrants wherever they see them."
Shira has been hiding out in Libya for a few months, trying to get work and waiting for an opportunity to get on a boat to reach Europe. "First, I was in Tunisia but I was chased by the Tunisian police," he recalls. He then tried to escape to Libya where Tunisian border forces almost arrested him. "They intended to hand us migrants over to the Libyan authorities and everyone knows what happens then," the teenager said. More often than not, migrants like him end up in one of Libya's detention centers.
"We continue to see widespread human rights violations against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Libya," Liz Throssell, United Nations Human Rights Office spokesperson, told DW.
According to the UN, those violations include trafficking, torture, forced labour, extortion, starvation in intolerable detention conditions, mass expulsions and the sale of human beings. "These are done at scale........