Mr. Sam Taylor:

I have not been there myself, but many of my colleagues have been. We are eating up time now so I will finish up quickly by saying that Médecins sans Frontières has been into more or less every war zone in the past 25 years. I have witnessed natural disasters, the Ebola outbreak and I have seen conflict with MSF. Hardened MSF professionals are traumatised by what they are seeing in these Libyan detention centres.

A friend told me one story about a man from Mali who was a painter and decorator. He had lived in Libya as a migrant with his papers for many years. He was brought into a detention centre to do painting and decorating. Once he had finished his work, he was detained by the smugglers and had to ransom his way out of the detention centre. He ended up on a boat. He did not want to leave Libya. He had no intention of leaving Libya. This is something that I had not appreciated before my colleague came to brief some of the committee members and their assistants on what we are seeing there. Some people are being forced onto these boats. The extremely negative and inaccurate narrative that we see in the media is not correct at all. This is an industry that makes vast sums of money. It is not regulated in any way, shape or form. It is too early for us to try to build capacity at the moment. What we need to do is save lives and stop more people drowning.