UNHCR's Biometric Registration Reaches 113,000 Refugees in Libya Amid Political Backlash

Libya hosts a large population of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants alongside an even larger unregistered population, and has no single unified central government able to grant UNHCR consistent access to the people it is trying to identify and protect. UNHCR uses its global Biometric Identity Management System (BIMS) to register refugees and asylum seekers in Libya, operating primarily out of Tripoli.

Its own published registration dashboards show steady growth: 56,687 registered by end-2023, 79,019 by end-2024 (a 40% increase, with 36,159 new registrations that year), 88,283 by April 2025, 110,908 by April 2026, and 113,026 (48,959 cases) by 1 June 2026.

Sudanese nationals account for over 83% of registrants, and Tripoli alone hosts 47,701 people, or 42% of the total. UNHCR has been explicit that registration captures only a fraction of new arrivals: of an estimated 228,800 Sudanese who arrived in Libya in 2024 alone, only about 30,800 were registered that year.

The programme's growth is well documented through UNHCR's own regularly published dashboards, corroborated independently by Human Rights Watch. But the same registrations have become a direct source of political conflict: as early as 2018, UNHCR's Special Envoy Vincent Cochetel said Libyan authorities were 'opposed to us providing proper documentation.' In June 2026, Libya's House of Representatives issued a statement rejecting migrant settlement, a Tripoli city council accused UNHCR of 'undermining national security' and called for its expulsion, and protesters blockaded UNHCR's Tripoli headquarters. The case illustrates both the scale a biometric registration system can reach and how fragile its sustainability is when the host state actively contests its legitimacy.