GREECE is working with four other European countries to set up deportation centres beyond their borders, “preferably in Africa,” Migration Minister Thanos Plevris said today.

He spoke a day after the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Support Mission in Libya issued a joint report calling for a moratorium on refugees being intercepted and returned to Libya, saying their violent abuse in the north African country was not incidental but a “systemic, exploitative business model.”

Mr Plevris said Greece was working with Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark on the hubs, where people whose asylum applications are rejected but whose countries of origin will not take them back would be deported. The project is reminiscent of the Rwanda deportation scheme pursued by Britain’s previous Tory government.

The European Union has recently adopted harsher rules on asylum, its parliament voting last week to designate a list of “safe” countries from which asylum applications could be dismissed as inadmissible, as well as “safe third countries” to which they could be deported even if they have never been there.

The bloc’s effort to prevent refugees from reaching Europe has included subsidising the Libyan coastguard to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros. Libya became a major transit route for African refugees seeking to reach Europe after the overthrow of the Muammar Gadaffi government by Britain, France and the US in 2010.

Tuesday’s UN investigation found that refugees crossing or returned to Libya continue to be tortured, sexually abused, sold in slave markets or dumped in the desert to die if attempts to extort ransom from their relatives fail.