“Women State Trafficking”: A report highlights the role of Tunisian authorities in the trafficking of migrant women

The report has been published on the website statetrafficking.net. It will be presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday, April 22, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. (Spak Room 7C50).

View and download the report “Women State Trafficking” in English here

Excerpts from audio testimonies are also available on the Border Forensics website.

See also the previous “State Trafficking” report (June 2023–November 2024) in English.

Context

Since 2023, thanks to substantial European funding, Tunisia has established a system of interceptions at sea, arrests, and mass deportations to Libya that affects thousands of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, including many women, families, minors, and children.

This second report follows on the heels of the first “State Trafficking” report, published in January 2025. Through victims’ accounts, it has reconstructed the five stages of a logistics chain that has become integrated and refined, particularly following agreements between the EU and Tunisia. This chain is structured as follows:

• 1) arbitrary arrests in various locations across Tunisia
• 2) transport to the Tunisian-Libyan border
• 3) detention in camps on the Tunisian border
• 4) transfer and sale to Libyan armed groups, whether state-affiliated or not
• 5) detention in Libyan prisons until the ransom is paid.

A significant portion of the infrastructure used for state-sponsored trafficking indirectly benefits from funds made available by the European Union and Italy to intercept departures, as documented by ASGI in its contribution to “State Trafficking”.

Between June 2023 and April 2025, “forces from the Libyan Ministry of the Interior and the Libyan Border Guard intercepted 12,750 migrants and refugees at the border with Tunisia” [1] Between June 2023 and December 2025, approximately 7,400 people are believed to have been victims of state-sponsored trafficking in this area (this conservative estimate refers exclusively to the 59 collective deportation operations from Tunisia to Libya that the report’s authors documented based on collected testimonies).

This second “State Trafficking” report focuses on gender-based violence experienced by migrant and refugee women in Tunisia and Libya during deportation, trafficking, and detention operations, from December 2024 to February 2026. “Women State Trafficking” is based on 33 new interviews with victims conducted since December 2024.

The report aims to address the following research questions:

• Are the migrant trafficking operations carried out by the Tunisian state apparatus in collusion with Libyan authorities and armed groups, documented in the previous “State Trafficking” report for the period between June 2023 and November 2024, still ongoing?
• What are the specific forms of violence against women, families, and minors during deportation and trafficking operations carried out at the border between Tunisia and Libya?
• Is there a link between the deportations of migrant women from Tunisia and the network of detention and sexual exploitation in Libya?

Report Findings

Interviews with victims (primarily women released from Libyan prisons) shed light on a new dimension of human trafficking: on the one hand, structural gender-based violence—imposed by the lack of medical care, dehumanizing treatment, intimate searches, and rape—perpetrated by state agents (on both sides of the Tunisian-Libyan border); on the other hand, the link between Libyan prisons, forced sex work, and enslavement through labor.

1. Dehumanization

The testimonies collected describe a range of violent arrest practices in Tunisia targeting migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, which seriously undermine the dignity and integrity of those affected. These practices include public humiliation, threats, deprivation of basic necessities, degrading rituals, denial of medical care, as well as the destruction of legal identity and the systematic dehumanization of the individual.

During transport to the border, people are restrained with plastic ties on their hands and sometimes on their feet, forced to keep their heads down under threat. They are deprived of water and food and prevented from attending to their physiological needs. Transported in trucks designed for livestock, the detainees are crammed into cramped, windowless spaces, forced to travel standing up and unable to move. They are then locked up at the Libyan border in spaces described as “cages” or metal enclosures, sometimes compared to dog cages (p. 24).

The geolocation work conducted by Border Forensics highlights the persistence of human trafficking at the border by Tunisian police and military forces, as well as the link between the pushback infrastructure and the kidnapping industry in Libyan prisons. In particular, the report identifies the Tunisian National Guard barracks in El Meguissem in Tunisia and a complex network of detention centers in Libya, including Al Assah, Bir Al-Ghanam, and Characharah (Tripoli), as the main hubs of state-sponsored trafficking, through which witnesses of “State Trafficking” and “Women State Trafficking” have passed (see p. 15).

During certain deportation operations along the road connecting Medenine to the Dehiba/Wazzin border crossing, unidentified military hangars are used as places of torture, humiliation, and dehumanization. During the sale, detainees are often subjected to further searches, stripped naked, and publicly humiliated. The procedure is designed as a transaction that transfers control and custody of the bodies from Tunisian authorities to those of Libya (p. 25)

Among the acts of violence reported by witnesses are numerous cases of miscarriages caused by the harsh conditions endured during capture and detention. Minors and newborns are often detained in conditions that pose a serious health risk. The denial of obstetric and pediatric care appears to be one of the most brutal forms of gender-based and generational violence, aimed at turning the mother-child bond into a powerful tool of psychological pressure. Pregnancy represents another critical threshold, where physiological vulnerability intersects with the violence of the prison regime (p. 26)

Violence is also used as a means of suppressing revolts: a witness recounts that the GNT shot at people’s feet and committed murders during escape attempts at the border at the Dehiba checkpoint, during the sale (p. 30)

2. Rapes

Physical and sexual violence, perpetrated by uniformed officers, is systemic at every stage of the journey: from capture in Tunisia to release from the network of prisons—official or otherwise—in Libya. Furthermore, all forms of violence continue in the places of sexual exploitation, following detention (p. 29). During the Libyan phase of state-sanctioned trafficking, rape by guards becomes a recurring experience for all witnesses: sexual assaults occur daily both inside detention centers and outside, such as in abandoned buildings near prisons, where women are taken by force or through deception. Rape and gender-based violence must be considered in every respect as forms of torture (p. 30).

Violence against women is often deliberately staged in open spaces, in the presence of other detainees. Husbands, fathers, and sons are forced to witness these scenes and, as “spectators,” become themselves the targets of indirect and psychological violence, which multiplies the traumatic effect. (p. 31).

3. Forced prostitution

Women are bought in bulk at the Tunisian border and resold individually in Libya. The price at which they are sold, at every stage of the trafficking process, is consistently higher than that of men, reflecting the existence of a forced sex work market in Libya (p. 37)

The women who are bought are not released, but transferred to detention centers for forced labor or to brothels run by Libyan or Nigerian nationals. In most cases, the women sold do not know the price at which they were sold, which may be expressed in terms of the number of months of work required to repay the “debt.” The conditions of sexual exploitation are characterized by deprivation of liberty, constant surveillance, the obligation to provide sexual services (with the daily presence of clients), direct payment by clients to the managers, the absence of remuneration for the victims, and the systematic use of threats and violence to force them into sex work (p. 37).

Conclusions

The new collection of testimonies, consisting largely of women and minors who survived detention in Libya, has made it possible to reconstruct more accurately the role of sexual violence within the overall trafficking system. The testimonies indicate that sexual abuse and rape occur repeatedly during arrest and deportation operations in Tunisia, as well as during detention in Libyan prisons. These practices are not isolated incidents, but rather systematic mechanisms of control, subordination of bodies, and extraction of value from them.

Like the first, this second RR[X] report helps document events and situations that the social sciences and international law classify under the term “state crimes.” “Women State Trafficking” thus aims to reignite the debate on the responsibility of the European Union and its various member states for exposing people in transit to death and slavery, as well as on the “safe third country” and “safe country of origin” status attributed to Tunisia, and on its role, alongside Libya, as a partner and economic beneficiary in the management of the EU’s external border.

Based on the testimonies collected and verified, and with the assistance of ASGI, the report also enabled several witnesses and victims of state-sponsored trafficking to file a complaint against Tunisia with the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. These proceedings are based on the direct testimonies of the victims (RS - int. 35 and SLM - int. 36) and aim to highlight the Tunisian state’s responsibility for the systematic practices of arbitrary detention, violence, collective expulsion, and the sale of human beings to Libyan exploitation networks, carried out by its own security apparatus.

Among the various recommendations made by the report, the following are noteworthy:

• The immediate suspension of all new funding for border policies intended for Tunisia and Libya, as well as any form of operational cooperation with the authorities involved in the documented practices, until responsibilities are established.
• The removal of Tunisia from the lists of safe countries of origin and safe third countries established by the European Commission and the Member States, and the assurance that neither Tunisia nor Libya will be considered “places of safety” for the purpose of disembarking migrants in distress in the Mediterranean.