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LIBYA: Women, and Girls Locked Up Indefinitely Without Charge


March 2, 2006

The Libyan government is arbitrarily detaining women and girls indefinitely in “social rehabilitation” facilities, Human Rights Watch said in a report released this week. Officially portrayed as protective homes for women and girls “vulnerable to engaging in moral misconduct,” these facilities are de facto prisons.

The 40-page report, A Threat to Society? Arbitrary Detention of Women and Girls for “Social Rehabilitation", documents numerous and serious human rights abuses that women and girls suffer in these facilities. These include violations of their rights to liberty, freedom of movement, personal dignity, privacy and due process.

Libyan authorities are holding many women and girls in these facilities who have committed no crime, or who have completed a sentence. Some are there for no reason other than that they were raped, and are now ostracised for staining their families’ “honour.” Officials transferred the majority of these women and girls to these facilities against their will, while those who came voluntarily did so because no genuine shelters for victims of violence exist in Libya.

“These facilities are far more punitive than protective,” said Farida Deif, Middle East and North Africa researcher for the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “How can they be called shelters when most of the women and girls we interviewed told us they would escape if they could?”

“Social rehabilitation” facilities have a distinctly prison-like character. The women and girls sleep in locked quarters and are not allowed to leave the gates of the compound. The custodians sometimes subject them to long periods of solitary confinement, occasionally in handcuffs, for trivial reasons like “talking back.” They are tested for communicable diseases without their consent upon entry, and most are forced to endure invasive virginity examinations. Some residents are as young as 16, but authorities provide no education, except weekly religious instruction.

These women and girls have no opportunity to contest their confinement in a court of law, and typically have no legal representation. The exit requirements of “social rehabilitation” facilities are in themselves arbitrary and coercive. There is no way out unless a male relative takes custody of the woman or girl or she consents to marriage, often to a stranger who comes to the facility looking for a wife.

Read the complete report: A Threat to Society? Arbitrary Detention of Women and Girls for “Social Rehabilitation" (Human Rights Watch) (February 2006)


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