Thursday, November 12, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
REFUGEES: Fate of Hundreds Unknown
Samuele Gabbio
- UN officials have been denied permission to check the safety of about 850 migrants deported to Libya from Italy since Friday.
The Italian government is flying the migrants to Libya after hundreds landed on the tiny Italian island Lampedusa over recent days.
"They are keeping us from complying with our mandate," United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) spokeswoman in Italy Laura Boldrini told IPS.
Both the Libyan and Italian governments turned down the UNHCR request to assess "possible protection needs under the 1951 Refugee Convention."
The Italian government deported migrants so fast that it was impossible to determine case by case whether any were legitimate asylum seekers, said Boldrini.
The UNHCR expressed "deep concern" over their fate in Libya.
"We recognise the very strong pressures that these continuing arrivals are generating, but all those who request asylum should have access to fair procedure," director of UNHCR Europe Raymond Hall said in a statement.
On Tuesday about 500 migrants were being detained at a centre meant for 200 people. About 100 others have been transferred to Crotone in Sicily where their cases will be considered, Boldrini said.
Claudio Scaglia, head of La Misericordia, an organization that deals with refugees in Lampedusa declined to comment.
Migrant centres are administered by the Interior Ministry. Only some groups such as the Italian Red Cross and La Misericordia are authorised to work within the centres.
Media are denied access to the camps. "After a rather unfavourable report issued by MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) no one was ever allowed in again," Maria Silvia Olivieri from Solidarity, a non-governmental organisation working with refugees told IPS.
Thousands of migrants attempt the more than 100km Mediterranean crossing from North Africa to Europe each year. The crossing in flimsy ‘pateras’ (boats) is a hazardous one.
At least 17 people drowned off the Tunisian coast while trying to reach Italy on Sunday, a Tunisian news agency reported. Another 47 from a group of 70 Moroccans and five Tunisians were recently reported missing. Italy gets the largest number of African migrants in Europe, but many head also for Spain, Portugal and France.
The number of asylum seekers coming to Europe has fallen from a peak of about 400,000 a year in the 1990’s, to about 65,000 now. The number of migrants arriving in Sicily dropped from about 18,000 in 2002 to 9,700 in the first nine months this year.
The source of migration has been shifting from Asia and the Balkans to Africa, bringing more mishaps on the Mediterranean. The UNHCR says about 5,000 people trying to cross into Europe have drowned in the past decade. Of those who get through to Italy, only 12 to 15 percent get asylum, Boldrini says.
The arrival of the migrants in Lampedusa raises questions about asylum again.
Disputes have arisen among European countries over a plan proposed by German interior minister Otto Schily to set up refugee centres in North Africa to process asylum applications.
Italy backed Schily’s proposal, but France, Sweden and Belgium opposed the plan on the ground that the camps would be located in countries that do not guarantee rights to refugees.
Britain had made a similar proposal to Schily’s earlier, but dropped it in the face of opposition from most European countries.
The quandary of asylum seekers was highlighted when 37 Africans rescued by a German ship on June 20 spent weeks on the Mediterranean seeking a port that would welcome them. After they were allowed to land in Sicily, the Italian government deported them.
The migrants had claimed they were escaping civil war in Darfur. They were found later to be from Nigeria and Ghana, and were sent back to those countries.
"UNHCR is concerned that this method of sorting by nationality could put individual cases in need of international protection at risk," the UN agency said in a press release from New York.
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