This is popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to journalist Sally Hayden, and she's going to be speaking about an investigation

she's been doing for over a year now, which basically shows that the EU and to a lesser extent the UN has been facilitating the

abuse of refugees in Libyan detention centers. These centers are run by

militias. The EU basically gives money to the Coast Guard to stop the refugees get into Europe and kind of doesn't really care what happens to them after that.

But if you listen, Sally will explain it all. If you like what we're doing at

Popular Front please do consider supporting us at patreon.com slash popular front

there are bonus episodes all sorts of stuff there

patreon dot com slash popular front

I guess I guess firstly maybe we start at the beginning with this story right there's a situation in Libya

You've been helping these people for a long time now documenting it really really well on Twitter and with articles and what have you.

Maybe you can just start at the beginning and tell us what this is all about.

Yeah sure. I mean I guess to explain how I came upon this story I need to go back a little bit more which was in

2017 I got a grant to look into EU funding in North Africa. So specifically there's this what's called the EU Trust Fund for Africa

which is a multi billion euro fund effectively aimed at kind of preventing migration to Europe by, you know, about increasing border security in a lot of countries in Africa and also they have kind of like livelihood programs and things like that.

So I went to Sudan to partially to look at that and also just to look at what the situation

was in terms of refugees and migrants trying to get from there to Europe.

As we all know, there was what they called the migration crisis around 2014, 2015, 2016 when, you know, more than a

million refugees and migrants came to Europe looking for safety or looking for opportunity as well and so this fund came out of that.

So I went to Sudan and I ended up reporting on something a bit different which was allegations of corruption in the United Nations Refugee Agency.

And what I was being told there was that refugees there were being asked for tens of thousands of dollars to be resettled to a safe country.

So essentially it was difficult for them legally to get to safety and so they were turning to

...