Under the cover of night, small boats depart from the Libyan coastline, headed toward sanctuary in Italy. Packed onto rickety vessels and often bought and traded by armed gangs, thousands of migrants and refugees face grueling challenges on their journey north. Some are unaccompanied children; others face religious persecution or financial extortion in their home country, forcing them to brave the trip to Europe. Libya’s spiralling lawlessness, civil war-torn political landscape, and limited legal avenues by which to escape have driven thousands to travel by sea on the world’s deadliest migration path: the Central Mediterranean route. Since the government’s dissolution in 2014, large swaths of land along Libya’s borders and expansive coastline remain ungoverned and open to rampant trafficking and uncontrolled migration, lined by rival gangs and human smugglers. Many seek to escape widespread human rights abuses perpetuated by these groups, yet the EU and Italy’s forceful attempts to curb migration flows will instead cause many Libyan migrants seeking freedom across the sea to perish en route.
Along the perilous journey, migrants risk capsizing, sickness, and drowning by the thousands. In 2025 alone, 1,745 people embarking from the Libyan coast disappeared or died trying to cross the Mediterranean, yet Italy and the EU have only intensified efforts to keep migrants out. Some of the greatest barriers to freedom these migrants face are aggressive European anti-migration policies that push them back into the clutches of smugglers and perpetuate a vicious cycle of violence and exploitation. By tightening external borders and funding inhumane detention facilities, border control pacts like the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) subject migrants to exploitation and human rights abuses rather than providing safe and legal paths to sanctuary in Europe.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is credited with reshaping EU migration policy, favoring even more stringent bilateral agreements and national policies. From redistributing migrants among member states to heightening border control, Meloni has spearheaded efforts outsourcing migration management instead of enforcing domestic human rights safeguards and encouraging regional cooperation. Italy’s crackdown on illegal immigration has intensified alongside her rise to power. In 2025, Meloni’s transfer of rejected migrants to detention centers in Albania was the first time an EU country sent migrants to a nation that was neither their origin nor transit country, echoing the Trump-spearheaded deportation regime in the United States. Italy’s exploitation of Albania’s “fast-track asylum” process joins the MoU in a growing wave of anti-migrant EU efforts, with the newest relevant policy in February 2026 making deportations easier by allowing nations to deny asylum and return migrants to countries deemed “safe.”
Initially signed on February 2, 2017, the EU-sponsored MoU provides the Libyan Coast Guard with financial, technical, and material support, enabling them to intercept tens of thousands of Libyans fleeing inhumane conditions at sea and drag them to brutal detention centers for indefinite periods of time. These facilities run by the Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration in Libya hold anywhere from a couple thousand to 20,000 migrants, with thousands more held in “unofficial” centers controlled by armed militias. Crammed into small spaces and deprived of running water and food, detainees experience extensive torture, gender-based violence, starvation, and forced enslavement. With little legal regulation and ambiguous state mandates for armed groups, many migrants are forced to work on farms or factories without medical services, food, or water once brought back to Libya. While the MoU’s supposed aim is to secure national borders and prevent human trafficking, it instead allows the EU to “outsource migration management to third countries.”
As a stipulation of the agreement, Italian funds must be allocated to the provision of such centers, implicating Italy directly in the variety of human rights abuses that are devastating migrants and refugees. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s investigation into breaches of international humanitarian law in Libya, migrants are “routinely subjected to gross and systematic human rights violations,” aided by collusion between smugglers and state officials. The Human Rights Council concluded that Libyan authorities and their international partner, Italy, have done little to curb crime and reform migrant detention centers. Yet, despite this evidence, the MoU has been renewed every three years since it was first signed in 2017, and both the EU and Italy have spent millions of euros to provide the Libyan Coast Guard with vessels and aerial surveillance equipment throughout this time period. The lack of EU reform despite its awareness of such atrocities is a striking example of hypocrisy. Even as senior EU officials and member countries admit to being “conscious of the appalling and degrading conditions” faced by migrants in Libya, migration policies have only reflected a commitment to strengthen borders and offload responsibility.
Italy not only finances and legitimizes violence against migrants, but it also actively seeks to criminalize lifesaving search and rescue efforts. Italian authorities have effectively closed their ports to NGO search-and-rescue vessels like the Aquarius, a humanitarian aid boat that was denied a safe port while carrying 629 migrants on board. By applying intense political pressure on NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Italy has aimed to inhibit the capacity of search-and-rescue vessels and has imposed harsh sanctions and punitive measures that “mak[e] it easier and faster to confiscate humanitarian…vessels.” The Piantedosi Decree, which Italy issued in 2023, facilitated the detention of search-and-rescue ships and forced humanitarian boats to ignore distress calls at sea by requiring them to immediately head to port after each rescue. Migrants rely on humanitarian groups like MSF to provide shelter, relief items, medical support, and to run specialized centers to respond to survivors of human rights abuses. Combined with facilitating forced interceptions at sea, this obstruction of life-saving search-and-rescue missions further degrades the conditions migrants must endure.
Italian migration policy is only one example of how anti-immigrant attitudes have become increasingly embedded in policy decisions, reflecting a broader European wave of hypocritical anti-migrant hostility. There has been a slew of international backlash against the current US government’s violent deportation regime, yet the dire conditions faced by Libyan migrants have not attracted public attention on a grand scale. Above all, the EU and Italy’s continued support for the status quo normalizes the violation of human rights for the sake of border control, in direct contradiction with the values of international law they claim to defend.
As small boats continue to depart from Libya in darkness, the EU strategy of externalizing responsibility is brought to light, revealed not as a measure of security, but as a calculated anti-migration effort. Italy and the European Union must reverse course and uphold the human rights of migrants and refugees by providing safe and legal pathways for migration and reforming policies governing the Mediterranean. Otherwise, they remain complicit in sustaining the cycle of abuse and death they claim to prevent.