The Mediterranean Crossroads Transit Migration, Containment Policies, and Human Rights in Libya and Tunisia

Abstract

North Africa, and Libya and Tunisia in particular, have emerged over the past two decades as the principal transit zones for migrants and asylum seekers attempting to reach Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. What was once primarily a region of emigration has been fundamentally transformed by European Union externalization policies into a space of migration containment, where the rights, dignity, and lives of transit migrants are routinely subordinated to the imperatives of European border management. This article undertakes a critical political and legal analysis of the transit migration landscape in Libya and Tunisia, examining how EU-funded bilateral cooperation agreements, border surveillance operations, and detention infrastructure have produced a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions while failing to produce the migration reductions they promise. Drawing on documentary analysis of EU-Libyan and EU-Tunisian cooperation agreements, field interviews with forty-eight transit migrants, sixteen civil society representatives, and nine government officials conducted between 2021 and 2022, and a systematic review of human rights reporting from UNHCR, IOM, and Amnesty International, the study finds that externalization policies have displaced rather than resolved migration, pushed migrants into increasingly dangerous and clandestine routes, and empowered abusive actors — including militia groups in Libya and security forces in Tunisia — as proxies of European border control. The article argues that the current framework is legally indefensible under international human rights and refugee law and proposes a rights-centered alternative built on safe legal pathways, robust asylum systems in transit countries, and shared responsibility mechanisms between the EU and North African states. The findings contribute to critical border studies, the political economy of migration management, and debates on the extraterritorial application of human rights obligations.