From ancient Rome to Libya today, armed conflict has been marked by sexual violence on a mass scale. But what links the two, and can it ever be stopped? Libyan woman Eman el-Obeidy, moments after rushing into a Tripoli hotel, defends herself from government officials. When Eman el-Obeidy materialized in the breakfast room of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, Libya, the story she told shocked the world. The year-old woman, a law graduate, claimed to have been held and raped by 15 members of leader Muammar Qaddafi's forces after being stopped at a checkpoint.

We detected high levels of risk behaviours, poor HIV-related knowledge, high stigma and lack of prevention programmes. These results must be interpreted in the context of the political situation which prohibited reaching an ideal sample size for FSW. There is urgent need to implement an effective National HIV Strategy informed by the results of this research. The risk of transmission within different risk groups and to the general population may be high given the recent military events that led to increased violence, migration, and the disruption of essential HIV-related services. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

A fundamental principle of human rights law is that states should not subject any individual to arbitrary detention. The prohibition on arbitrariness means that the deprivation of liberty, even if provided for by law, as is the case in Libya, still must be proportional to the reasons for arrest. Human Rights Watch maintains that when detainees are held indefinitely for indeterminate and arbitrary periods of time, their detention is arbitrary, even where the initial detention was in accordance with applicable legal standards. Where a detainee has served her sentence yet remains detained, the arbitrary nature of the detention is exacerbated. Article 9 of the ICCPR also specifically requires that detainees be informed at the time of arrest of the reasons for their arrest and promptly be told of any charges against them.