Illegal migrant arrival rates are on the rise again, with many experts comparing them to the 2015 Migration Crisis figures, a crisis that crippled European movement and ignited political debate that is now coming to fruition with a common migration policy slowly emerging.
As Greece and Italy struggle under the weight of arrivals once again, they look toward North African states to stop these flows, but reports show that migrants face harsh conditions in these countries, where human rights abuses and modern slavery have been reported over the past years.
Situation in Libya
The North African state struggled under Muammar Gaddafi’s leadership from the 1960s up until his death in 2011, when several uprisings against his rule culminated in a civil war. Since then, the country has been divided, with unaligned tribes controlling the south, an internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, and the Government of National Stability allied with the Libyan National Army based in Benghazi.
Migration in Libya is two-fold; there are Libyans arriving in Europe fleeing the conflict of their own state, and there are migrants from various other states utilizing Libya as a stop on their journey to Europe. IOM Libya reported “824,131 migrants from 47 nationalities” as of December 2024: the highest since 2020.
This instability has allowed abuses against these migrants and against Libyans themselves.
In May of this year, violence erupted again after the killing of Stabilization Support Apparatus (SSA) leader, tasked with security by the GNU in Tripoli. In June, over 80 bodies bearing signs of abuse and torture were found across several sites linked to the militia, confirming global suspicions that these were “sites of torture and enforced disappearance.”
These were not the first mass graves found; in February, two mass graves of over a hundred bodies were discovered, many with gunshot wounds, identified as migrants. In March 2024, 65 migrants were found in similar mass graves.
EU Pushbacks and Migrant Abuses
Though Libya is not the only state to struggle with a large influx of migrants in the region, it is one of a few countries with continuous reports of migrant death and abuse.
In 2024, the Washington Post, as part of a larger investigation of migrant abuse in North Africa, reported systemic pushbacks of migrants into the deadly desert, including on the border of Libya, funded by EU states to stop migration at the root.
Other sources also reported the system of modern slavery that is ransom demands. Some migrants told the Washington Post in May 2024 that after being detained in Sfax, they were loaded into trucks and taken to an “off-road border guard post,” where Libyan militiamen handed a briefcase over to Tunisian officials, selling them off.
A similar report, compiled by the Associated Press in 2021, told the story of migrants in Libyan detention centers being beaten and tortured and then told to call family members to transfer money for their freedom, and then proceeding to sell them off again.
EU funding hasn’t ceased but shifted focus to the “Protection of vulnerable migrants” and “Integrated border management.” The former is the area that focuses on Libya the most, providing €393 million just in Libya, according to the 2024 report.
Despite this, officials have stated that Libyan authorities are not trustworthy. They are however a key partner, nonetheless.
Individual states meanwhile continue to cooperate based on the “third safe country” principle of deporting migrants to states that are outside the EU but safe so that migrants can avoid persecution.
Italy, for example, continues to cooperate with Libya on migration, as they have done so for years. Recently, they provided Libya’s Chief of Judicial Police, Osama “Al Masri” Njeem, with a government plane to return to his country despite rights groups and the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing him of “long documented horrific violations committed with total impunity” at the Mitiga prison in Tripoli and witnesses saying he tortured and killed prisoners in the detention centers he was responsible for.
The Mediterranean Routes in Numbers
For the summit on June 26, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote that the Pact on Migration is to be implemented at an accelerated pace and must include cooperation with North African states, which will be embedded in a Pact for the Mediterranean. She highlighted Libya as a key partner, as it accounted for 93% of illegal border crossings, greatly contributing to an increase of 7% on the Central Mediterranean route to Italy and 173% to Greece from Eastern Libya.
Frontex, in its mid-year report, named the Crete-Libya corridor as the one responsible for the most crossings, despite reporting an overall 24% drop on the Eastern Mediterranean route. The Central Mediterranean increased by 12% between January and June in 2025, with more than 29,300 irregular crossings; some 20,800 arrivals in Italy came from Libya, accounting for an 80% increase compared to last year.
The IOM’s Missing Migrants Project reports 1,005 migrants are either dead or missing as of August 13 across the Mediterranean. The Central Mediterranean remains the most frequented and most dangerous, with 718 deaths.
As migration integrates into a shared competence within the EU, the bloc must consider carefully how it handles areas like Libya: increasingly corrupt and dangerous, pushing migrants away as much as halting them before a deadly journey for Europe, and impossible to bypass during a migrant’s journey.
