(Picture: UNHCR’s building, filed pic. Source: UNHCR)
by Alessandro Pagano Dritto (Twitter: @paganodritto)
[September 13th, 2017 – Italy] UNHCR will return to Libya between September and October 2017, UN Special Envoy Ghassan Salamé announced in a phone call with Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Angelino Alfano. The announcement was reported by an FM official statement last September 12th, the very same day when UNHCR also expressed its commitment to return to Libya and stated that it is
“currently negotiating with the Libyan authorities the establishment of an open reception centre that would allow refugees and asylum seekers freedom of movement, giving priority to the most vulnerable among them. In this reception centre, UNHCR could provide registration, accommodation, food, social services, counselling and support to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, and solutions in third countries for the most vulnerable”.
Concerned over reducing the illegal flows of migrants reaching out Italy from Libya, Rome and particularly Rome’s Interior Minister Marco Minniti have been frequently in contact at many levels with Tripoli’s UN backed authorities throughout 2017. Flows effectively lowered during last summer, but NGOs have repeatedly accused the Italian government for affecting migrants’ human rights as Tripoli’s Libyan Coast Guard kept taking them back to the Libyan coast and closing them in centres just partially controlled by the UN backed authorities.
[Read the unofficial translation into English of the August 2017 interview to Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Angelino Alfano on Between Libya And Italy]
So, Italy has urged UN to gain a major grip on the Country and supported return of its agencies there after itself reopened its own embassy in the Capital last January. Also, Italy has called UNSMIL to lead the separate initiatives by different Countries especially after France hosted talks between Khalifa Hafter and Fayez Serraj at the end of July: “There is a need to simplify the negotiations on Libya” – Alfano was quoted to say even before the French meeting materialized and when it was just a rumor – suggesting UN should have “all the power to act a sole mediator”. But, even after the meeting, the Italian Foreign Minister expressed similar words during a phone call to Ghassan Salamé last August 21st, when the relative official statement read that “Alfano and Salamé underlined the need that international initiatives on the stabilization of Libya could be taken under the common denominator of UN’s umbrella”.
In that last occasion Alfano also urged UNHCR to be a stronger reality in the North African Country.
[Read the unofficial translation into English of the April 2017 interview to Italy’s Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti on Between Libya And Italy]
Italy’s Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti disclosed UN was going back to Libya during an interview to the Italian press last April 29th, when she stated that
“UN Deputy Secretary General, Jean Pierre La Croix, both in plenary and in the bilateral meeting with me during the Defence meeting in Malta, told me the decision had been taken: UN goes back into Libya”; she also added that “the two UN agencies dealing with migrants, UNHCR and IOM, can get back the control activities on the ground respecting the human rights as well as the rights of the refugees and the migrants, collaborating with us and on the base of the agreement between Italy and the Libyan government, forseeing that it would be up to the United Nations managing the migrants in Libya”.
[Read the unofficial translation into English of the May 2017 interview to UNHCR’s Regional Director for Middle East and North Africa Amin Awad on Between Libya And Italy]
Next May 1st, the UNHCR Regional Director for Middle East and North Africa Amin Awad confermed the agency’s return, himself to the Italian press, detailing it as imminent: “two or three months will be needed for everything to be working: security, logistic, personnel”, he said. Stating then that
“at the beginning, the international staff for all the humanitarian agencies will count about 20 or 30 units, but we’ll also have a local staff already working with us in the past, so that we can grow to 120 units. Beyond Tripoli, we’re planning to open field offices in Benghazi, Tobruk and in the South. We’ll work with all the authorities, both with the internationally recognized ones and the others”.
UNHCR Libya’s official Twitter profile was created last August, while his representative, the Italian national Roberto Mignone, created his own just a month before and twitted for the first time on August 28th; possibly, all signs that the Libyan branch of the UN agency is starting a new phase and seeks for fresh visibility.
Interviewed by the Italian news outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano‘s journalist Stefano Feltri soon after his appointment, Mignone explained UNHCR must take care of refugees in Libya as the Country did not signed the 1951 Geneva convention and therefore it does not consider the refugees as a separate costituency: they’re just illegal migrants as any other and detained over that. He then counted 42.000 asylum seekers, 250.000 displaced Libyans and 250.000 displaced Libyans who eventually managed to return home. UNHCR then runs, along with the other UN agency IOM, 12 coastal centres where the Libyan Coast Guard desembarks the migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean: the difference between IOM and UNHCR, Mignone explains, is that IOM takes care just of the economical migrants, while UNHCR of the refugees and of the asylum seekers.
Mignone described the main points UNHCR is focusing on: in Libya, training the Libyan Coast Guard over a way to act adhering to the international law; South of Libya opening centres in order to inform the migrants of what they could go through once in the Country, registering the refugees and providing them a document of international protection, offering an alternative way to them, helping the ones of them who wants to go back and providing assistance on the ones remaining in Libya. Eventually, some of the migrants could be helped to join their families in a third Country if their documents allow them to do it.
On September 12th, UNHCR officially stated it is “opposed to the routine detention of refugees and displaced persons” and it reported to be “working to assist and protect over 535,000 people in Libya, including over 226,000 Libyans displaced by conflict, 267,000 Libyans who have now returned to their homes but continue to be in a vulnerable situation and 42,834 registered refugees and asylum-seekers”.
[Read the unofficial translation into English of the September 2017 interview to UNSMIL’s Ghassan Salamé on Between Libya And Italy]
Between Libya And Italy 
