Refugees Urgent Support Hotline
Community-led support, documentation and referral for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants facing violence, detention, exploitation and urgent vulnerability.
Built from an urgent need
RUSH began because people facing danger could not wait for institutions to recognise the urgency of their situations.
Since late 2021, Refugees in Libya has operated a free WhatsApp hotline through which refugees, asylum seekers and migrants can report abuse, violence, arbitrary detention and other situations of vulnerability. The hotline also provides relevant information, follows cases where possible and connects people with competent services and trusted organisations.
What began as an immediate community response is now being developed into a more secure and structured programme capable of supporting individual cases while identifying wider patterns of abuse.
RUSH is not only a communication channel. It is a community protection mechanism built from trust, lived knowledge and the refusal to allow people in danger to disappear into institutional silence.
What RUSH Does
Receives urgent reports
People can contact RUSH to report violence, arbitrary detention, exploitation, gender-based violence, protection failures and other serious situations affecting refugees and migrants.
Provides information and referrals
Where possible, RUSH provides reliable information and connects people with legal, medical, protection or humanitarian services.
Documents patterns of abuse
With appropriate safeguards, reports can contribute to understanding repeated violations, institutional failures and the wider systems affecting refugees and migrants.
Assesses urgency
Trained operators review each report, identify immediate risks and distinguish urgent cases from those requiring information, documentation or longer-term follow-up.
Follows individual cases
Reports can develop over several conversations and may continue even when a person changes location or phone number. RUSH works to preserve continuity rather than treating every message as an isolated incident.
More Than a Hotline
A single message may reveal an immediate danger. Hundreds of carefully documented reports may reveal an entire system.
RUSH is therefore more than a helpdesk.
It allows us to follow individual situations while building a secure and organised record of what communities are experiencing. When responsibly documented over time, these experiences can reveal recurring abuses, dangerous locations, responsible actors and failures by authorities or institutions entrusted with protection.
This documentation can contribute to continued case follow-up, advocacy, investigations, strategic litigation, evidence preservation and demands for accountability.
Behind every record, however, remains a person. Documentation exists to strengthen protection and justice—not to transform people’s experiences into statistics.
How RUSH Works
1. Contact Us
A refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, family member or trusted community representative contacts RUSH and explains what is happening.
2. A Human Operator Responds
A member of our team receives the message, listens to the person, assesses the situation and identifies possible next steps.
3. The Case Is Documented
Relevant information can be securely organised so that developments can be followed over time without requiring people to repeatedly recount what they have already experienced.
4. Support, Information or Referral
Depending on the circumstances and our available capacity, we may provide information, continue documenting the situation, connect the person with relevant services or protection actors, or raise the case with organisations or institutions able to intervene.
5. Patterns Become Visible
When separate cases are responsibly analysed together, they can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden: repeated violence, trafficking routes, detention practices, dangerous locations, responsible actors and institutional failures.
Human Decisions. Responsible Technology.
Technology helps us organise RUSH. It does not decide who deserves to be heard.
RUSH is being developed using secure and open-source technologies that help our team manage conversations, follow cases over time, work across languages and organise large amounts of information responsibly.
Language and other technological tools may assist with translation, classification and analysis. They do not determine whether someone is telling the truth, whether their experience matters or what action should be taken.
Some experiences cannot—and should not—be reduced to categories or database fields. People must remain able to tell us what happened in their own words.
Human judgement remains at the centre of RUSH. Communication, assessment, escalation and decisions concerning individual cases remain the responsibility of human operators.
Privacy, Safety and Dignity
People contacting RUSH may be fleeing militias, traffickers, detention authorities, abusive employers, state institutions or other actors capable of retaliation. Protecting their information is therefore inseparable from protecting them.
RUSH is being developed around principles of data minimisation, restricted access, secure case management, responsible retention and careful handling of messages, photographs, documents and other sensitive material.
Information is not collected simply because it can be collected. Access to sensitive information should correspond to what is necessary for the work being performed.
Where information may contribute to advocacy, investigation, litigation or wider documentation, its use must be considered carefully and responsibly.
What RUSH Can—and Cannot—Do
RUSH is a community-led support and documentation programme. It is not a governmental emergency service and cannot guarantee evacuation, release from detention, resettlement, financial assistance or intervention by another organisation.
Our ability to respond depends on the urgency of the situation, the information available, the safety of everyone involved, our capacity at the time and the protection pathways or services that can realistically be accessed.
We will not promise what we cannot deliver.
What we can promise is to approach people with dignity, take their experiences seriously and be transparent about what may or may not be possible.
Building RUSH
RUSH is being developed by Refugees in Libya in collaboration with the Hermes Center.
The work began by examining the hotline that Refugees in Libya had already built through years of direct communication with communities. As the number of conversations and documented cases grew, so did the need for a system capable of securely organising information, maintaining continuity between conversations and helping our team identify recurring patterns.
The development of RUSH includes structured case management, safer team access, improved multilingual communication and responsible methods for analysing recurring patterns across documented cases.
The wider collaboration has also brought together expertise in language technology, open-source investigation and international litigation.
The technology exists to strengthen our community-led system—not to take ownership of it.
The Next Phase
The future of RUSH depends not only on better technology, but on the people who keep the line alive.
The next phase will strengthen:
● hotline operators and continued training;
● sustainable staffing and shift coordination;
● multilingual and translation capacity;
● technical maintenance and digital security;
● responsible analysis of documented patterns;
● psychosocial support for operators exposed to traumatic material;
● referral and protection networks;
● investigation and accountability pathways;
● long-term preservation of documentation where appropriate.
We welcome institutional partners, foundations, organisations and communities willing to strengthen this work while respecting the independence, data sovereignty and community-led identity of Refugees in Libya.
Read the RUSH Report
The Refugees Urgent Support Hotline — Section I
The first RUSH report documents the transformation of our community hotline into a more structured system for support, documentation and accountability.
It examines the challenges created by large volumes of unstructured reports, the development of a secure case-management process, multilingual communication, responsible uses of language technology and the ethical principles guiding the programme.
The report also documents the lessons emerging from the first phase of development and provides the foundation for the next stage of RUSH.
Help Us Keep the Line Open
Every message reaching RUSH begins with a person.
Someone may be looking for safety. Someone may be searching for a missing relative. Someone may be reporting detention, trafficking or violence. Someone may simply need to know that what is happening to them has not disappeared into silence.
Keeping that line open requires people, secure infrastructure, translation, documentation, technical expertise, protection networks and sustainable financial support.
RUSH exists because communities should not have to wait for their suffering to become a headline before someone listens.
Make a donation
Your donation helps us keep RUSH open for refugees and migrants seeking urgent support, protection and a safe way to report abuses. It sustains our hotline operators, secure documentation, translation, referrals and the work of turning individual reports into evidence for advocacy, justice and accountability.
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