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Niger has approved a law against the smuggling of migrants in an effort to stem the flow of vulnerable Africans across its vast desert, many of them headed towards Libya and on to Europe.
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The law, approved unanimously by parliament on Monday, is based on a United Nations protocol against the smuggling of migrants and allows judges and police to take action. Niger’s desert town of Agadez is one of the main transit points in the Sahara for migrants leaving poor west African nations. Up to 4,000 migrants without travel papers can pass through Agadez every week, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
A spike in the numbers of immigrants attempting the dangerous sea crossing from Libya has sparked alarm in Europe, particularly after about 800 people drowned in a Mediterranean shipwreck last month.
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Authorities in Niger promised a crackdown after at least 92 migrants from the country died of hunger and thirst in the desert in October 2013 when they were abandoned by traffickers taking them to Algeria.
In an effort to prevent migrants without papers from being brutalised by security forces, the law emphasises that smuggled persons are victims of human rights abuses.
“The adoption of this law aims essentially to protect the frontiers of our country,” said the justice minister, Marou Amadou. “In these times of uncertainty, where organised cross-border crime is sowing terror in our country, it is indispensable that all those who travel in our country carry their identity documents. This law imposes that.“
The desolate, empty spaces of the Sahara in northern Niger and neighbouring Mali are home to drug and arms traffickers, people smugglers and armed Islamist militant groups, some of them linked to al-Qaida.
UN officials said Niger was the first country in the region to pass a law specifically against the smuggling of migrants. “You cannot train the judiciary to combat this crime if there are no laws on the books. So we start with the laws and we take it from there,” said Pierre Lapaque, regional representative for the UNODC, which helped draft the law.
Despite past pledges by Niger’s government to tackle people-smuggling, local officials in the Agadez region have profited from bribes being paid at checkpoints along the route, a Reuters investigation found.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimated last month that smuggling of migrants was worth up to $323m (£206m) a year in Libya, some of which was used to fund terrorism.
