On November 2nd, 2022, the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed for the first time in February 2017, was automatically renewed for three more years without amendments by the Italian Government. The Agreement, originally struck by the former Prime Ministers Paolo Gentiloni and Fayez al-Sarraj, lays out the terms for better management of migration flows or, more precisely, a more externalised one. 

It would be wrong, though, to write off Italian efforts to transfer the burden of managing migratory flows to Libya as a mere attempt to dodge responsibilities. The outsourcing of migration management through strengthening European external borders represents a longstanding strategy that the European Union has pursued since the creation of the Schengen area. The price for abolishing the internal barriers while keeping everyone “unwanted” outside. Political discourse aimed at representing migrants as a public threat, has been increasingly instrumentalized by governments to justify restrictive migration policies whose declared goal was to curb irregular migration. The MoU perfectly fits this framework, establishing Libya’s commitment to intercepting irregular migrants at sea and bringing them back to its shores. Once in Libya, they are held in detention centres, widely known for their ruthless violation of human rights, including violence, tortures, and sexual abuses. In exchange, Italy and the EU provide technical and financial support to the operations. 

However, this triangular interdependence has roots that go deeper than the 2017 Agreement. At an EU-Africa summit hosted by Italy in 2010, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi publicly stated that considering the millions of Africans waiting at Europe’s door, Europe “could turn into Africa”. He argued that the only way for Europe to avoid this was to pay Libya the cost of keeping migrants on its shores which he estimated to be €5 billion per year. In 2004, the European Union agreed to lift its weapons embargo against Libya, enforced throughout the 1980s following numerous terrorist attacks across Europe. In exchange, Libya agreed to cooperate with the EU in strengthening control of its coastal borders and stemming the massive flows of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. The Libyan government has manipulated Europe’s growing need to delegate migration management to entities outside its territory, employing human beings as bargaining chips to leverage political and financial gains.

Engaging in coercive strategies to manipulate their target is not new for countries with weak bargaining power and no alternative diplomatic tools. In this way, Libya has secured the dual role of both a generator of migration crises, through its systematic violation of human rights on its borders, and of an opportunist by exploiting the existing refugee crises from other African countries. It would be wrong, however, to focus exclusively on the use of coercion by Libya’s Government as evidence of its failure to adopt diplomatic tools. Rather, it is crucial to investigate how the European Union, ostensibly a human rights agent, could have fallen so far in its attempt to delegate policy enforcement, even at the expense of the rights it claims to protect. Sadly, this would not be the first time that authoritarian governments have succeeded in unveiling some of the contradictions inherent in EU migration measures. One of the most recent and discussed cases can be found in the EU-Belarus border crisis. Indeed, Belarusian President Lukashenko has been “weaponizing” migrants from the Middle East since 2021 to blackmail the EU for the progressive sanctions imposed since Belarus’ presidential elections in August 2020, as stressed by BBC’s correspondent Paul Adams (2021). Regardless of the dreadful conditions of migrants stranded at the EU’s eastern external border, the European Commission has not intervened to stop this violation of human rights. Once again, the infringement of the Common Asylum System, establishing the obligations of Member States to ensure the right to asylum, was well manifest.

Despite all this, the 2017 Italy-Libya MoU has been renewed. A few days before its automatic renewal, while civil society organisations were gathering to showcase their opposition, Italy’s newly appointed Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni chose Brussels as the location for her first international visit. During the visit, she met with Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian Prime Minister during the initial signing of the 2017 MoU. The irony was not lost on those civil society organisations that were waiting for Giorgia Meloni to resolve this stand-off. Most importantly, Meloni released substantial declarations about cross-border management, emphasising the need to strengthen cooperation between Italy and the European Union to uphold fortress Europe and reinforce its external frontiers. 

The most striking contradictions of the political strategy reflected in the MoU relate to the hurdles it imposes on refugees and their right to seek international protection. Turning refugee vessels away from Italian shores without processing passengers represents a violation of the Common Asylum System. A notable example can be traced back to 2009, with the then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi signing a formal agreement aimed at combating irregular migration after three vessels were intercepted and forcibly returned to Libya without any identification of the people onboard. The UNHCR in Tripoli later recognised the refugee status of fourteen of the passengers. 

This example underlines one of the greatest failures of European migration policies and as well as that of its member states: failing to differentiate between migrants and refugees without granting the latter alternative channels for accessing the asylum system, a practice the Italy-Libya MoU will perpetuate.