Sometime in the middle of the last decade, Essey left Sudan for Libya in the hope of making it to the promised land north of the Mediterranean. After a 1,400-kilometre journey with little food or water, instead of reaching the coast and heading for nirvana, Essey found himself in the hands of armed men who extorted thousands of dollars from his family while holding him in appalling conditions. He became weak and ill while his family continued to be fleeced. His plight is one of many recorded in Sally Hayden’s record of the great exodus of Africans hopeful of reaching Europe.

Amid the chaos of civil war, Libya has become, in the words of the former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, ‘a marketplace for the trafficking of human beings’. As Hayden writes in her passionate and eloquent book, none of this has prevented Libya from being elected to the UN’s Human Rights Council. Not that we should be surprised: the representative of Gaddafi’s brutal regime chaired the Human Rights Council’s equally grotesque predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, earlier this century. Another UN agency, the High Commissioner for Refugees, is depicted as no better, too often turning out to be part of the problem rather than the solution.

Hayden is angry about not only the suffering of those who seek to reach European shores from Africa but also the international institutions that are supposed to support them. The great virtue of the book is its exposure of widespread abuse and corruption. The author gives powerful voice