Campaign against the Prolongation of the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding

Campaign against the Prolongation of the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding

Refugees in Lybia

The issue

Every year, thousands of people who are fleeing the violations, slavery and human trafficking in Libya are captured in the Mediterranean sea by the so-called Libyan coast guard. Men, women and children are pushed back into horrible detention camps and many of them are sold to traffickers who torture, violate, rape and even demand for huge ransoms. The boats used for interceptions were donated by the Italian government on the base of the Memorandum of Understanding with Libya from February 2017. The European Union has been funding, training, equipping and politically supporting the DCIM (Department to Combat Illegal Migration) and other Libyan forces to prevent people from reaching Europe by any means (and with a crucial role of Frontex), despite solid evidence that this Memorandum led to numerous human rights abuses. Refugees in Libya started to prepare a campaign to stop the Memorandum, that’s renewed every three years.

In January 2025 the Italian government organized immunity and impunity for the criminal Almasri, who was arrested in Turin, because he runs one of the most infamous detention camps for migrants, as well as other concentration-like facilities. Despite the requirements of international treaties and Italian law, he was released rather than being detained and handed over to the ICC. And he was accompanied on a state-sponsored flight carried by an Italian secret service plane to Libya. 

Our demands

The main demands are to:

  • stop the memorandum
  • release all the detainees
  • shutdown all the detention centers
  • open safe corridors for all the vulnerable refugees living in Lybia
  • compensate all the victims and the survivors of this pushback policy by granting visa to safe countries and the economic compensation

About this campaign

The government remained silent or tried to present clumsy justifications about the impunity it granted to Almasry. In this situation the role of Refugees in Libya became crucial: the victims of the Libyan system took the floor themselves, explaining to parliament and the media who Almasri really is, what are his crimes and who are his Italian collaborators. Thanks to numerous interventions the brutal reality of migrant life in Libya has been exposed to the Italian public like never before, but reached also several international media.

The campaign against the memorandum should follow this successful public exposure of the scandal of this collaboration, trying to develop it on a transnational level, involving associations, civil and religious institutions, rescue NGOs, movements and oppositional political parties, and anyone who respects the treaties and conventions on human rights.

The campaign is launched on Friday, 20th of June 2025 – the world refugees day – by a press conference of Refugees in Libya. A series of information events follows until the campaign culminates in several days of action on a public space in Rome end of October (as the 2nd of November 2025 is the deadline for official objections).

All organizations and individuals are highly welcomed to join and to amplify this campaign, by their social medias but also by supporting the mobilization and direct participation in Rome in October.

Contacts