The UN refugee agency is once again calling for the release of migrants from detention centers in Libya. According to UNHCR, there are eleven official centers holding over 2,300 people in Libya, and many unofficial facilities about which little is known.
Migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are regularly being picked up by the Libyan authorities and returned to Libya. Charities report their rescue ships are often out-run by Libyan coast guards who beat them to take the migrants back. Nearly 500 migrants have been returned to Libya in recent days, according to the UN migration agency IOM.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has warned in a statement that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has laid "bare failed politics of aid to help migrants stranded in Libya" and worsened conditions for them.
Two Afghan men have been found guilty by Greek courts and sentenced to jail for six years and nine months each. The men are alleged to have taken part in riots on Tuesday at a migrant detention center in northern Greece. They deny any wrongdoing.
A Balkans-based network of human rights organizations says that the number of migrants pushed back from Greece into Turkey has spiked in recent weeks. The migrants allegedly reported beatings and violent collective expulsions from inland detention spaces to Turkey on boats across the Evros River.
In Greece, hundreds of people who were detained and denied access to asylum under an emergency law in March remain stuck in two mainland migrant facilities. The migrants were supposed to be sent straight back to Turkey. Their fate now is uncertain.
The UN refugee agency says COVID-19 and curfew conditions in Libya have reduced the possibilities for people to find ways to survive, prompting an increase in migrant departures from Libya towards Europe.
A hunger strike at a migrant holding facility in the Tunisian capital Tunis has ended last Friday after authorities met at least some of the demands of the migrants living at the center under difficult conditions. But demands to have migrants released continue to amass.
The UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Friday expressed grave concerns for the fate of hundreds of migrants returned to Libya by the coast guard this year who are now unaccounted for. The organisation stressed that it is ''unacceptable for people rescued at sea to be returned to abuse, trafficking, and war'' and reiterated its call to the European Union for urgent action to establish a clear and swift disembarkation mechanism to end returns to Libya.
Libya’s coast guard returned around 50 migrants to detention centers in Tripoli who had earlier been picked up at sea by a Maltese commercial vessel. At least five migrants have died and another seven remain missing from inflatable boats, on which the migrants had attempted to reach Europe, according to the UNHCR.
The Italian guarantor for the rights of detained persons has said that the number of people in CPR migrant repatriation centers has dropped slightly but that there is still a significant number of people in hotspots.
In Britain, at least five new detainees have been sent to the Yarl's Wood immigration detention center, despite reports of a case of Covid-19 in the facility. A British charity says all women in the center should be immediately released.