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The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) have made presentations to the new EU body launched last year, which aims at stimulating the externalisation of migration policies.
According to Yasha Maccanico, a Statewatch Researcher, the UN is withholding information regarding migration, human rights and humanitarian implications, while the international agency for refugees (UNHCR), as well as IOM, are sharing that information with the MOCADEM mechanism of the EU, which can pressure on third countries to implement migration management and border control policies, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
“More worrying still, it is a concern for UNHCR to be cooperating with EU strategies to limit both refugees’ possibilities to flee through muscular, intransigent and hi-tech border enforcement and the geographical availability of access to asylum through plans to externalise it further, which appear to follow goals opposite to the UN agency’s mission,” Maccanico said.
The UNHCR presentations, which reportedly were given by the agency’s special envoy for the Western and Central Mediterranean to the Council’s MOCADEM structure, inform the EU government officials about the refugees in Libya, and it also includes solutions for refugees, such as past and potential movements of people towards Libya and further to the EU, as well as calling new actions against trafficking and smuggling.
The situation is tricky, considering that UNHCR’s main purpose is to ensure that everybody has the right to asylum and find refuge in an effort to prevent violence or other safety-related challenges.
According to Sergio Scandura, a journalist with Radio Radicale, UNHCR is withholding information from the public since it can lose accreditations to operate at ports by interior ministries. He also says that almost all international humanitarian organisations that operate in disembarkation ports don’t give any information.
“About a year and a half ago, IOM/UNHCR Libya stopped showing photographs of arrivals in Tripoli… they disappeared, the posts from their social media accounts that documented returns to Tripoli used to be almost daily; there is only the IOM Libya account, which occasionally posts statistical data, numbers and little maps and graphs,” Scandura said.
The presentation further includes migration data from and to Libya, in addition to departures, disembarkations and the top ten nationalities that disembarked in Libya. A slide also shows the ongoing failures of the Tripoli Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC), which isn’t available enough on the phone and cannot mobilise Libyan forces involved in search and rescue.
A total of 25,000 people were disembarked in Search and rescue incidents throughout 2022, and no humanitarian body was present for almost half of those. Nearly 80 per cent of those cases include access issues for humanitarian organisations to attend, while the other ones weren’t informed.
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