Right to travel curbed in Libya

Libya denies freedom of movement to hundreds of people suspected of political dissent, rights activists allege.

By Jamel Arfaoui for Magharebia in Tunis – 15/12/10

While the second annual report on human rights in Libya issued by the Kadhafi Foundation on Sunday (December 12th) touted "significant progress on some issues", the human rights situation remains dire for Libyan citizens denied mobility rights.

Last June, after Salah Ahmid left prison, his family tried to leave Libya. His relatives demanded that the Libyan Minister of Justice revoke their citizenship. The minister claimed that the issue was beyond him and that it was for the security bodies alone to decide.

Hundreds of other Libyans have also been deprived of passports.

Libyan rights activist Faraj Hamid and his brother suffer from diseases that require them to receive treatment at hospitals outside Libya. But they are denied such a right because the security authorities are withholding their passports.

"My story dates back to February 7th, 2007, when we planned to stage a protest sit-in to mark the first anniversary of Benghazi protests," he said. At least 12 people were killed in February 2006, when the police opened fire on demonstrators in Benghazi protesting against the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

"The police attacked us in a repressive way; we were beaten and my house was burnt. Not only this, they even spilled benzene on me and wanted to set me on fire. However, an official at that moment stopped them and saved me from death. Yet, this didn't prevent them from arresting us. Several charges were made against us by the state security prosecution, including toppling the Jamahiriya regime and the people's authority, assaulting the person of Col. Kadhafi, collaborating with foreign entities, communicating with opposition overseas and sparking chaos and demonstrations," Hamid said.

According to Hamid, protesters received sentences ranging from six to 15 years but were released after human rights associations intervened.

"When I asked about the passport, I found out that it was kept with the security officials," he said.

Hamid and his brother need treatment outside the country because they are "suffering from disabilities as a result of torture".

Rights activist Abderrazek Mansouri shared a similar story.

"I was arrested in January 2005 because of publishing articles probing and criticizing the social and political conditions in Libya. All these articles were published on the internet, especially the Libya news website at that time. After that, I was detained for more than a year and a half. I was released in March 2006," he said.

According to Mansouri, the internal security department in Tripoli claimed that his personal documents, such as his ID card and passport, were lost at the offices of that department.

"After I was released, I met with security officials and asked them to look for my documents or give me a certificate evidencing that my documents were lost by the internal security department in Tripoli. However, their answers were just useless promises and nothing more. Did the Libyan internal security department intend to deprive me of my ID documents? Or was it just an administrative mess that always takes place in the systems that govern in the same way as the regime in Libya?" he wondered.

Unlike Abderrazek Mansouri and Faraj Hamid, who are banned from traveling, Libyan analyst and researcher Guma El-Gamaty and his family suffer from inability to return to their homeland. He has been living in Britain for several years, and was not only deprived of his Libyan passport, but is also threatened with imprisonment if he dares to set foot in Libya.

"To me, it's exactly the other way round. I live in diaspora, in Britain, and have not entered Libya for more than three decades. I don't have a Libyan passport. If I want to have a Libyan passport, a thing the Libyan authorities expressed their willingness to give, then I will have to return to Libya through the security gate, and my file with the different security authorities in Libya will have to be resolved. However, I completely reject this, because the security authorities require returnees from overseas to undertake not to engage in any political, rights or media activities, and to completely avoid public affairs," El-Gamaty said in a statement to Magharebia.

He added that "sometimes conditions include a humiliating demand, requiring the returnee to publicly declare his allegiance to Moamer Kadhafi, his theories and ideas. Thus, we see that the withdrawal of passports from people inside Libya is an express violation of their rights. Likewise, conditions for granting passports to people overseas, requiring them to return under these unjust conditions and restrictions, are also a major and express violation of their rights."

According to El-Gamaty, the political authorities in Libya use the passport, "as a tool to punish, submit and tame those who they are not satisfied with", which is "a violation of all international treaties and principles of basic freedoms".

"Therefore, I personally reject to return through the security gate or under any conditions that would restrict my absolute right to thinking, expressing and criticizing whoever I want in their ideas and policies regardless of their positions. I operate out of a conviction that no one in Libya today should be above criticism, above the law or be a red light! Nobody has the right to create red or green lights that limit our freedoms and the margins of our lives in our homeland. As to my children, they are not a part in any political situation. Therefore, their visit to Libya, their homeland, is a natural right," he said.

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights stipulates that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country" as well as "the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state".

In the first Universal Periodic Review of Libya, a mechanism by the UN Human Rights Council which involves a review of the human rights records of all UN Member States, the country was criticized by Western countries for "limiting the freedom of expression, compulsory disappearance, and treatment of prisoners and illegal immigrants".

The National Organization for Human Rights in the Libyan Jamahiriya denied accusations made by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International against the Libyan government.

In a statement posted on its website on December 4th, the organization said that the data of the two groups "includes a lot of mistakes and have ignored the continuous developments that are taking place in the field of human rights in the Great Jamahiriya. It also ignored Libya's success in the Universal Periodic Review while presenting its report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on November 9th, 2010."

According to article 20 of the Freedom Enhancement Law in Libya, the "freedom of movement and traveling at the time of peace are guaranteed, and failure to issue passports under any pretext is considered a ban on travel in an indirect way".

In March 1985, Moamer Kadhafi brought an end to travel ban lists, declaring at that time that the ban era was over. According to Mahdi Salah, lawyer and founder of the Libyan Association for the Defense of Human Rights, "the Libyan authorities' measures in withholding passports and banning citizens from traveling, represent a stark violation of the rights of those citizens and an express infringement of international laws and treaties".

Source: Magharebia.com.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2010/12/15/feature-01.