The Women State Trafficking Report: gender-based violence suffered by migrant and refugee women in Tunisia and Libya

RR[X], a network of European researchers supported by ASGI, Border Forensics, On Borders and Melting Pot Europe, has published in April 2026 The Women State Trafficking Report, a follow-up to the State Trafficking Report released in January 2025. This new report focuses specifically on the gender-based violence suffered by migrant and refugee women in Tunisia and Libya during expulsion, sale, and detention operations carried out between December 2024 and February 2026. The report is based on 33 testimonies which confirm the continued and systematic operation of the trafficking chain first identified in the previous report, with approximately 7,400 people subjected to state-sponsored human trafficking between June 2023 and December 2025. These practices of arbitrary arrests, forced expulsions toward the Tunisian-Libyan border, and the sale of human beings to Libyan militias and security forces are not isolated incidents: they are part of a stable, long-standing, and institutionally organized operational chain. 

A particularly significant contribution of this second report is the greater precision with which it reconstructs the role of sexual violence within the state trafficking system as a whole. The new corpus of testimonies, largely provided by women and children who survived detention in Libya, shows that sexual abuse and rape occurred routinely during arrest and expulsion operations in Tunisia, as well as during detention in Libyan prisons. These were not isolated incidents but rather systematic mechanisms of control designed to subjugate bodies and extract value from them. The report further identifies a link in the trafficking chain in Libya where prisons function as placement agencies for slave labor and through which women are subjected to further violence and deprivation of freedom in brothels or in situations of forced domestic labor.

The practices documented across both reports constitute extremely serious violations of human rights recognized under international law as crimes against humanity, including arbitrary detention, racial discrimination, collective pushbacks, enslavement, enforced disappearances, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, human trafficking, and gender-based violence, all of which involve institutional apparatuses and cooperation agreements between states and with the EU, and all of which have been systematically ignored by European institutions despite repeated warnings from civil society.

In light of these findings, the report issues a series of urgent recommendations to the European Union and its member states on the protection of victims and witnesses, monitoring and transparency, and on accountability and justice. Finally the report calls for the immediate suspension of all EU funding supporting border policies in Tunisia and Libya.