Ms Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui:

-----including Ireland. Some of this money is then assigned to Italy, Italy uses it, and this is where we lose track. It is very easy to say the EU as such - the Commission, for example - does not finance detention centres. However, there is also this organised system or lack of transparency in order to support that. For example, the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Salvini, has just announced that ten or 12 more assets will be provided to the Libyan coastguard. Where is the money coming from? We ask these questions; we do not get answers. Perhaps as Members of Parliament, the members will get the answers. As a European citizen, I also want to ensure that my taxes do not fuel human rights violations.

The discourse of some politicians is very much to focus on the pull factor, never to mention the push factors or the complexity of the situation, including the lack of safe and legal routes. Of Eritreans who make it to Europe, 90% will get asylum there, yet not a single resettlement of an Eritrean to Kenya, Ethiopia or Sudan has taken place. Family reunification is extremely difficult. The seriousness of the violations in Libya and the CNN video created some sense of urgency, and then the UNHCR was able to secure a deal with Niger to evacuate to Niger the most vulnerable people. That was the promise, that these people would be resettled in Europe. How many have been resettled? The centre opened in November. About 200 people have been resettled. Niger had to suspend the programme because it saw the most vulnerable ones arriving, the unaccompanied minors, the women and the children from Eritrea and Somalia, and they would not be resettled. When we say "comprehensive", we are actually only looking to pass the buck to someone else and to ensure that it becomes someone else's problem while promising we will help, yet we never help. We have the example of the EU-Turkey deal. How many people have been resettled from Turkey? How many people are currently stuck in Greece? My impression from working on these issues is that there is an extremely perverse discourse that is all about bypassing the law. For example, Italy has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for breaching the prohibition of torture and the principle of non-refoulementfor its co-operation with the Libyan coastguard.

What do we do now?

We now train and equip the Libyan coastguard to set up a search and rescue region. We get it to do the dirty business for us and to say it is not us. However, our marks all over this. We cannot simply say we are doing this in the name of saving lives. We hear all of the time that we are supporting the Libyan coastguard because it is saving lives. Of course, no one wants anyone to drown at sea but saving lives means disembarking them in a place of safety, not taking them to detention centres where they might end up in the same cycle of abuse.

On Sudan, I work for MSF Amsterdam. We do not have an operation in Sudan but other centres do. I will speak from a non-specialist point of view. The EU is supporting the rapid intervention force formerly known as the Janjaweed, which says it all.