Journalist Sally Hayden on the plight of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya

Now it's time for our perspective guest on the program today and it is World Refugee Day. The theme this year, Solidarity with refugees, emphasizing the importance of building inclusive health systems and ensuring equitable care for refugees worldwide. Well, my guest today is someone who knows the problems for refugees only too well. Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and author of My Fourth Time We Drowned Seeking Refuge on the world's deadliest migration Route. She joins us now. Thanks very much for being with us on the program. Let's talk a bit, first of all, about your book, if we can. It started, didn't it, when you received a message on Facebook asking for help. Yes, exactly. And thank you so much for having me. So the book basically started in 2018 when I got a message that said, hi, sister Sally, we need your help. We're under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story. And this kind of came out of nowhere, and I didn't know what to make of it, But I responded. I said I'm a journalist. I, you know, probably can't help you, but you can tell me more about what's going on if you want. And the sender was an Eritrean, Eritrean man who said that he was with hundreds of people, that they were in the middle of a war. A war had just broken out. The guards who had been locking them inside and the detention center they were in had run away. They'd been left without food or water. And they were desperate for help. And so I thought that this, you know, once I had done everything to verify it, I started posting some of the messages on Twitter. Actually, I then started publishing reports. And I thought this must be, you know, an accidental oversight. This must be that these people had kind of fallen through the gaps. And actually, what I would uncover over the following years of reporting was a whole system that's set up to abuse people, that's being supported through EU policy. And what transpired about these hundreds of people was that they had tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea. They were caught at sea, forced back to Libya, locked up indefinitely. And that this is a much, much greater story or crisis that's going on. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible that you picked up on it so much, isn't it? Because it's the kind of message that you could receive and just ignore. But you decided to to pursue it, didn't you? Yeah. I mean, that's being a journalist, I guess. You got contacted all the time. And it's. It's strange to think about how some messages you might not respond to. And I think the book, I mean, I really hope people read it. By the way, it's now available in French as well. The book kind of documents all these messages. It also includes throughout the text in italics, direct messages from people because I wanted to include those voices unfiltered where I could. And it also kind of raises questions about technology and about the idea that now we can know what's happening across the world. You know, we have more access and more communication than ever before. We can witness human rights abuses happening thousands of miles away and at the same stage, you know, maybe feel like we can't do anything about it. And and at the same time, like we're becoming much more cruel in our policies. We're becoming, you know, we're closing our borders even though we have this information and this access. And yeah, I really wanted to raise questions around that. Tell us a bit more generally about what you've discovered about the situation for people in Libya, because it is appalling, terrible, isn't it, some of the conditions and some of the things that that happened to people. Yeah. So what is basically happening is a circumnavigation of international law by the EU. And since 2017, almost 137,000 men, women and children have been caught on the central Mediterranean and forced back to Libya. And there they're generally locked up without charge or trial and in detention centers where all kinds of abuses are happening, starvation, medical neglect, torture, rape, forced labour. Yeah, generally quite horrific things. Since the book came out in English, it has been cited in a submission to the International Criminal Court calling for named EU officials and and various European officials to be charged or investigated anyway with crime for crimes against humanity. And I think it's worth pointing out because it would be of interest to a French audience. One of those implicated is Fabri Slashery, the former head of Frontex, who has now, I think, been elected as an MEP for Marine Le Pen's party. I noticed that you, you, you're very critical of EU institutions. Is that who you blame for this? I mean, do you blame European leaders or do you blame the the people traffickers as well? You know, so I'm a journalist. Like, I don't set out to blame anybody or to criticize anybody. I've collected evidence over years and people can read. I'm not sure about the French edition, but the English edition has about 65 pages of footnotes or, or of endnotes because I wanted everything to be sourced. I want people to see where I'm getting this information and then to draw their own conclusions and certainly to question why there hasn't been more accountability and to. Yeah, see, yeah, I, I wanted to make this evidence available, basically. And so in terms of criticism, you know, my job is not to, to, to criticize so much as to I, I see a lot of the migration debate happening at the moment. You know, it seems to be quite removed from the actual reality and the actual facts of what's happening. There's a lot of jargon. We hear terms like migration management, you know, do Europeans know that migration management can mean people being locked up indefinitely in detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps by Pope Francis, among others? Like, I'm also a European. I'm from Ireland. And part of the reason that I spent years reporting this was I realized this is being done in my name. And I hadn't been aware as a journalist who had already been focusing on migration. So therefore, how's the general European public meant to be aware of that? How are politicians meant to respond, though? I mean, if you look at opinion polls, if you look at what people, ordinary people are saying in Europe #1 issue quite often is that they're most concerned about is migration. Surely they have to respond to that. Yeah, I mean, I talk to a lot of European politicians who say basically they don't want the far right to get in power and therefore they feel like they have to implement these policies to stop the far right getting in power. And I think there's a problem with some of the framing and that if your anti migration policies are already far right, you know, it should you be referred to as being not far right yourself? I mean, I challenge people to read the book and again, to, to think about what they're hearing, the the kind of jargon that they're hearing, you know, these phrases that they're hearing repeated again and again and whether that's actually how that compares to the reality for people. And yeah, part of the issue is that the people going through these journeys are being silenced. We're not hearing their voices often enough. And therefore, yeah, I'm not, I'm again, not, I'm a journalist, I'm not an activist. I'm not saying what the policy should be. But I think when the policy becomes removed from the reality, that's when you get this scope for massive human rights abuses. And also what we're seeing is dehumanization. We're seeing the use of words like migrants, for example, Like, this is not a homogeneous group of people. They're people from all different countries fleeing all sorts of different things, you know, with many different life experiences. And if we had a boat of people described as tourists who were drowning in the Mediterranean, we would send people out to rescue them. So why has it become OK that, you know, if it's a boat of so-called migrants that we just leave them to die? And the, the number of people who have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014 is about to top 30,000 according to IOM figures. But that's likely to be actually much lower than the the actual numbers. And so the fact that like Europeans aren't constantly seeing this as an urgent crisis or constantly questioning how this has been allowed to happen, it does speak to the dehumanisation that's happening in terms of like a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the way that these conversations are taking place. You do manage to get some hope into the book as well, don't you? You talk about how people work together in that situation. If they're stuck in in prisons, for example, in Libya, supporting each other through incredibly tough time. Yeah. It was really important to me that this is not, you know, a human rights report. It's like, it is a collection of evidence, like I said, but it's also a collection of just stories of people existing in very difficult conditions, how they survive under that, how they support each other, how they fall in love even. And yeah, there's a lot of kind of personal stories of people, you know, just talking about how they get by, the humor they find, how they survive after they get to Europe as well. And yeah, I do hope that people read it and also kind of get an insight into that, you know, And it's, it's, I try like I tried to just portray it as it is. I'm not saying everybody's a hero. I'm not saying everybody's a victim. I'm just saying, you know, I'm just showing the small experience of of the people that I put in, which by the way, is like a very tiny percentage of what the information that I received. And that's obviously a tiny percentage of the overall information. But hopefully it gives people an insight into this. Sounds like you've got another book, a book on its way. Just finally, very briefly, if you can, I mean, it's World Refugee Day today. Would you have a message for people, you know, listening and hearing this? I mean, I think in terms of a message, yeah, it's a tricky 1I I am, I think a lot of us are feeling quite hopeless a lot of the time. And, you know, the world seems to be getting very cruel. And at the same stage, I've started telling myself that you don't have to have hope to be on the right side of history. You know, I see my role as just portraying the facts and making sure that they're being reported and making that available for people. I do think like questioning the words you're, you're hearing like even the term migration crisis, like actually what we're seeing is a global inequality crisis. We're seeing a situation where a large portion of the world's population, they're just not being given the same rights as other people. They're not being, their lives aren't being perceived as having the same value. And many of them are fleeing, you know, horrific things. For example, Sudan, now the war there is the world's largest displacement crisis. According to the UN, 10 million internally displaced, nearly 2,000,000 refugees. Congo has nearly 7 million displaced. There's there's many crises happening that we're not necessarily hearing enough about in Europe. And that doesn't mean that they don't exist. And I guess just just, yeah, people informing themselves about that. It's very important rather than having these debates that are removed from from all of that. Sally Hayden, great to talk to you on the program today. Sally Hayden, the journalist and author, That of my fourth time We drowned.