The Tunisian state as a human trafficker. Evidence from the report: “State Trafficking: Expulsion and sale of migrants from Tunisia to Libya"

Guest post by Researchers X. RRX is an international research group that has decided to remain anonymous and go by a collective pseudonym. This choice is dictated by the need to protect their safety while allowing them to continue their work on a topic that cannot be researched freely in Tunisia without being subjected to radical repression. The group planned the research, collected and analysed the materials, as well as supervising the entire research process. You can find a copy of the report here.  

RRX is a network of academic researchers, of different nationalities and backgrounds. As a collective, while doing our work, we came across several pieces of evidence of a state crime that we felt compelled to disclose. However, we decided to remain anonymous:  we, as European citizens and academics, are the only responsible of what you will read in the RRX Report. 

Our work adds a further step to what we know about the current situation in Tunisia. It contributes to a growing series of report on the matter, including:  

• Desert Dumps, by Lighthouse Report, which documents the recurrent practice by Tunisian authorities of dumping captured migrants in the desert towards Algeria and Libya;  

• Interrupted Sea, by Alarmphone, documenting how Tunisian National Guard fails its rescue duties and even purposely provokes shipwrecks to block migrants heading to Lampedusa; 

• Torture Roads, by OMCT, focusing of human rights violations committed during 2024 against people on the move by Tunisian Authorities; 

• Letter by the Special Rapporteur of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to Tunisian authorities (AL TUN 6/2024)  

Our inquiry, which is the result of 18 months of work and is still ongoing, builds on and confirms the results of all previous reports. While all the already documented human rights violations are still ongoing, we have been able to unveil an unprecedented and hidden story. Drawing on 30 testimonies, and their geo-localisation, these are the basic findings of our report: Tunisian police and military apparatuses sell sub-Saharan migrants, intercepted at sea or captured in cities, to a constellation of state and non-state actors operating in Libya, who run the economy of detention and kidnapping. This process is what we call “State trafficking”. 
 
We use the expression “State trafficking” because, on the Tunisian side, the basic infrastructure is built on and run by state actors. In addition, we highlight that buses, cars, boats, weapons, petrol, salaries, uniforms, drones and other technologies that make possible migrant capture and trafficking rely on conspicuous European funds allocated to strenghten border policies. These funds are documented in the last section of the report.  

Our research began in 2023, from what is a fragment of the first testimony of the Report. The first documented case dates back to June 23rd; with the last one dating back to a shipwreck on the 28th December 2024, whose survivors, taken to the port of Sfax, have all been sold and are now in Libya.  

The collected testimonies are individual but they involve very large groups; thus, they stand for a collective story. In total, we estimate that behind our 30 testimonies, there are thousands of individuals that have been sold and bought. This is only a minimal part of what in criminology is called the dark number. 

To safeguard the reliability of the information, we a) multiplied the sources by ensuring the diverse origin of the witnesses; b) documented enslavement operations over a long period of time; c) verified the spatio-temporal details of the events recounted.  

This report both reconstructs and documents routes, detention facilities, situations of violence and torture, prices. In some cases, we were able to get the nicknames of the people responsible, or codes of the involved police/military units. For instance, GN73 unit is the last operating detention point at the tunisian-libyan border). We have been able to locate “the cage”, the last point of detention in Tunisia before the sale and the passage point where humans are sold. All cases concern racialised sub-saharians black migrants.  

How is the pipeline organised, linking the capture in Tunisia, the expulsion to the border and  the detention in Libyan prisons? We have reconstructed the apparatus as follows.  

• Black people are captured and taken to places of confinement in Tunisia; 
• then, they are transferred by force to the Libyan border in large buses; 
• they wait in detention camps close to the Libyan border if the agreement between sellers and buyers is not yet finalized; 
• they are sold at variable prices (between 12 to 90 euros per head) by Tunisian military corps, and bought by Libyan state and non-state actors; or they are exchanged for petrol and hashish; 
• once in Libya, families of captive migrants are asked for a ransom of between 600 and 1,000 euros; 
• the area of Al Assah, which is also the headquarters of the Libyan Border Patrol, is one of the most recurrent locations in the victims' trajectories; if freed, they are released in the neighbouring town of Zwara. 

From the collected testimonies, some key points arise that are worth highlighting.  First, the people being sold. Every black migrant is a potential victim: men and women, minors and children, pregnant women and babies, paperless subjects, UNHCR refugees, workers and students with regular documents of stay. Second, this form of state violence is structural. Many die from the violence they suffer or from the lack of basic care. Some victims denounce that corpses have been abandoned in the Tunisian desert. Third, there are no pathways to assistance or protection. There are no lawyers or legal protection, nor there is any form of medical assistance for those sick or injured by the violence of authorities. Lastly, there is a high recurrence of torture and sexual violence. 

We would like to thank all the witnesses who courageously have entrusted us with their words and their stories, while in risky situations. These are now available to read through all the excerpts in the report.  

In light of this report, we urge EU authorities to: 

1. Clarify and investigate the facts;  
2. Identify those responsible, and  
3. Put an end to this cycle with all means possible, political and juridical.  

As a first step we claim for  the activation of a humanitarian corridor, with the aim of making these voices audible before a European court. Many written questions have been addressed to the EU Commission and the Italian Foreign Ministry. As of today, they have yet to be answered. 

The report State Trafficking by RRX is an initiative supported by the following organizations: ASGI, OnBorders and BorderForensics.