Pushbacks by Proxy — The Libyan Coast Guard as Europe's Outsourced Border

Since the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy (2012) that EU member states cannot directly return people intercepted at sea to Libya, European institutions developed an alternative: they would not do it themselves. They would pay others to do it for them.

This is the logic of what can be called pushbacks by proxy. The so-called Libyan Coast Guard (LCG), a collection of militia-linked, semi-state entities, was trained, equipped, financed and coordinated by EU institutions and member states to intercept people on the move in international waters and return them to Libya. The EU thus shed direct legal responsibility for the human rights violations that followed, while remaining the operative architect of the system.

The construction of this proxy was deliberate and documented. After the Hirsi ruling prohibited direct EU pushbacks to Libya, measures were developed to continue the abductions without direct European contact with people fleeing their homes. What followed was a decade of institutional investment: patrol vessels, training programmes, coordination centres, surveillance data shared via Frontex drones, and over €465 million in EU funding — four and a half times more than all EU investment in Libya's economic development, health, governance and education combined.

The creation of a Libyan Search and Rescue Zone in June 2017 was the operational centrepiece. It transferred coordination authority for rescue operations in a vast area of international waters to Libyan authorities — giving the scLYCG the legal pretext to intercept boats and issue instructions to civilian vessels, including NGO rescue ships. Italy and the EU simultaneously shed direct responsibility for what happened next: people intercepted were taken to militia-run detention camps, where torture, extortion, forced labour, sexual violence and arbitrary killing were — and remain — systematic.

The individuals carrying out these interceptions were not an independent force. Commander Abd al-Rahman Milad — known as "Bija", formerly head of the coast guard in Zawiya — attended official meetings with the Italian Ministry of Interior while simultaneously being accused of crimes against humanity in a UN Security Council report and implicated in the sinking of migrant boats. He was arrested for human trafficking, then released. The system that produced him continued to receive EU funding.

Multiple international bodies have condemned the practice. The UN Security Council, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Committee Against Torture, the UN Human Rights Committee and the administrative court in Trapani have all found the MoU's practices incompatible with international law. The ICC received a complaint. The funding continued.

Sources

ECtHR: Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, Grand Chamber, 2012

ECCHR: "Interceptions of migrants and refugees at sea" — ecchr.eu

Sea-Watch: "Violence at Sea 2016–2025"