Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

Libya from the 1970s to the 1990s
I. Background
Twelve of the fifteen men profiled in this report said they left Libya between 1988 and 1990.
Of the three others, one left in 1991 and the others in 1996. 31 Libya at the time was a brutal
police state. 32 Dissidents were arbitrarily arrested and held for years without charge, and
often for long periods in incommunicado detention. 33 Torture of those in custody was
rampant. 34 Family members of suspected opponents of the government were harassed,
threatened, and detained. 35 It was a country in which the death penalty could be imposed
on “anyone who calls for the establishment of any association or party which is against the
Revolution in purpose and means.” 36
Leading up to this period Gaddafi had developed a unique political philosophy, a hybrid of
socialism and Islam called the Third Universal Theory, which sought independence from
communism and capitalism. This theory was enshrined in the “Green Book,” which he
wrote to present his theory of a system of government called Jamahiriya, or “state of the
masses.” 37 According to the Green Book, the Jamahiriya system was the final evolution of
democracy, because citizens did not elect representatives but participated themselves
31 Mohammed Shoroieiya, Abdullah Mohammed Omar al-Tawaty, and Mafud al-Sadiq Embaya Abdullah left Libya after 1990,
Shoroeiya in 1991, and Tawaty and Embaya in 1996.
32 Amnesty International documented several serious gross human rights violations in Libya during the 1970s and 1980s,
including “severe limitations on the rights to freedom of expression and association; arbitrary arrests and detentions of
thousands of real or perceived opponents of the political system; incommunicado detention; torture or other forms of illtreatment;
grossly unfair trials; unlawful killings and summary executions; and the imposition of the death penalty including
for the peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression and association.” See Amnesty International, ‘Libya of
Tomorrow’: What hope for human rights, MDE 19/007/2010, June 2010,
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE19/007/2010/en/65e2d9ca-3b76-4ea8-968f-
5d76e1591b9c/mde190072010en.pdf (accessed July 24, 2012), p. 18.
33 Ibid.
34 See Human Rights Watch, Libya—Words to Deeds: The Urgent Need for Human Rights Reform, vol. 18, no. 1(E), January
2006, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/libya0106webwcover.pdf, p. 48-49. Fifteen out of thirty-two individuals
interviewed by Human Rights Watch that were imprisoned in Libya between 1990 and 2006 said that Libyan security
authorities had tortured them during interrogations, usually to extract a confession.
35 See Human Rights Watch, Words to Deeds, p. 38-42.
36 Libyan Penal Code (1953), art. 173; See also Human Rights Watch, Words to Deeds, p. 29; and Amnesty International,
‘Libya of Tomorrow’, p. 18 (“mass arrests of suspected opponents of the political system and public executions of presumed
‘counter-revolutionary’ elements”).
37 See Human Rights Watch, Words to Deeds, p. 12.
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