Exploitation by smugglers

Smugglers will charge you a lot of money to transport you across borders towards Europe. They routinely deceive migrants into thinking it is easy to reach Europe. Smugglers are also very likely to change the agreement they made with you – suddenly demanding more money, holding you at ransom and transporting you in overcrowded and dangerous conditions.

Smugglers are known to sell people to other gangs or kidnap migrants for forced labour or to extort money from families back home. In Libya, you may find yourself locked in a detention centre and subjected to abuse. Other migrants are forced into slavery to pay their debts or to earn money for the next leg of the journey. For women, this is often prostitution and for men hard labour.

There have also been reports that migrants who cannot afford to pay their traffickers are sold for their organs to organized crime rings. An Eritrean human trafficker recently testified that migrants who could not afford the fees were sold for their organs to an Egyptian crime ring.

To maximize profits, smugglers in Libya cram as many migrants as possible onto small boats meant for only a handful of people. Often these boats cannot make it safely across the Mediterranean. More than 5,000 migrants died at sea in 2016 – the vast majority in the Mediterranean while trying to get to Italy from Libya.