Human rights violations, violence, forced disappearances, and murder have been a daily occurrence in Libya, without any accountability in most cases. Hundreds of activists, human rights campaigners, and lawyers, including women, have been killed or disappeared without a trace. Since the NATO-backed rebels took over the country in 2011, Libya has been unstable, lacking security while armed militias and gangs, unchallenged, roam most of the vast country. The situation is particularly worse in big cities like the capital Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city and the cradle of its 2011 revolt. 

Against that background, it was not unusual for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to call in a March 25 news brief on the Libyan authorities to stop the crackdown on “civil society in Libya, where arbitrary arrests and a campaign of social media vilification” are taking place.

What is unusual this time around is the list of charges leveled against the seven activists, by the Internal Security Agency (ISA). The list included serious accusations such as apostasy and contempt of Islam, the country’s main religion.

UN Human Rights spokesperson Liz Throssell said, “Seven men, aged between 19 and 29, were arbitrarily arrested” by ISA in Tripoli between November 2021 and last month. She also pointed out the fact that ISA has “posted videos of the seven men on Facebook,” in which they confess to being “atheist, areligious, secular and feminists.”