Migration is top of the agenda as summit between European and African leaders gets under way in Ivory Coast

A detention camp in Tripoli, Libya. CNN has released video footage of slave auction houses in some camps. Photograph: Ismail Zetouny/Reuters

Patrick Wintour and Angelique Chrisafis

A plan for a voluntary evacuation of migrants in Libya government-controlled detention camps lies at the heart of an emergency migration plan for Africa.

Leaders from the European Union and the African Union arrived for a summit in Ivory Coast on Wednesday vowing to take action following CNN’s shocking video footage of slave auction houses in Libya.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, described the abuse of migrants as “a crime against humanity” and said that the EU and AU would “launch concrete military and policing action on the ground to dismantle those networks”.

In an interview with France 24, Macron said he was not advocating sending foreign troops to Libya, adding: “It’s not about declaring war, Libya is a state in political transition … but there’s reinforced police action that needs to be done to dismantle those networks. We’ll do it.”

He also called for “individual, financial and physical sanctions” against human-trafficking networks, which he said were closely linked to terror groups in the region.

The plan, which could see up to 15,000 people flown out of Libya, requires the government to allow the UN’s evacuation planes to land, as well as for source countries to come to a holding centre in Tripoli and take back their citizens. Migrants without documentation would be held until their case is resolved.

The EU is likely to provide the funding, which in effect dramatically speeds up a voluntary repatriation scheme already being run by the International Organization for Migration.

Some African leaders also expressed anger at the Libyan government, with the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, claiming it was appalling that his compatriots were being sold “like goats”. Libya has said isolated cases are being used to cast all Libyans as racists.

Migration was already at the top of the agenda for the first AU-EU summit since 2014, but the footage of markets in Libya injected immediacy into the issue, spurring French government calls at the UN on Tuesday for sanctions against identified traffickers, the closure of migrant detention camps and renewed calls for Europe to accept more African migrants on a managed basis.

More than 3,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Italy this year, it was confirmed this week.

AU states are eager to ensure that the Libyan crisis does not detract from an agenda to address the long-term causes of migration, including poor governance, climate change and absence of private sector investment. They also want EU commitments on the number of migrants it is willing to take. France has promised to accept at least 3,000 from Niger and Chad over two years.

Both Macron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, have promised to make Africa a priority, but details of EU funds for Africa are often opaque.

Macron is on a three-day tour of Africa and, in his first major address on the continent before a crowd of university students in Burkina Faso on Tuesday, said he wanted Africa and Europe to “help populations trapped in Libya by providing massive support to the evacuation of endangered people”.

Conscious that France, by backing the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, is seen as having a large share of responsibility for Libya’s current political disarray, Macron reiterated his criticisms of French intervention in Libya under Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011. “I would not have supported the intervention in Libya,” he said, “because there was not a diplomatic vision or diplomatic solution.”

Taking questions from the students in Burkina Faso, Macron downplayed the idea of European countries opening their doors to more direct migration from Africa. “If you say, ‘I’ve got a right to total access without conditions’ … I can’t explain that to my [lower middle class], who have worked, who pay their taxes,” he said. “What do I tell them?”

Source: The Guardian