Five years after bombing Libya and effectively destroying its government, NATO has declared plans to impose a naval blockade on the North African nation in order to prevent refugees and migrants from entering Europe.

Human rights experts say this plan likely violates international law, like the E.U. plan to deport refugees and migrants en masse to Turkey.

The U.S. expressed support for the proposed NATO blockade this week.  “[Obama] said he was willing to commit NATO assets,” Italian Prime Minster Matteo Renzi told reporters.

After a meeting of the heads of state of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Italy, the White House released a statement saying the Western leaders urged NATO and the E.U. “to draw on their experience in the Aegean to explore how they could work together to address in an orderly and humane way migrant flows in the central Mediterranean.”

NATO is already patrolling the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey for refugees and migrants fleeing violence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Through the NATO mission in the Aegean Sea, the U.S. has shown its willingness to take part in combating illegal immigration here,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, characterizing mass refugee movement as “illegal immigration.”

According to Merkel, President Obama assured European leaders the U.S. is “prepared to also take responsibility with regard to the migration route from Libya to Italy if necessary.”

An estimated 350,000 people have set sail from Libya to Italy since the beginning of 2014. Many are fleeing the violence that has roiled the oil-rich North African country since the 2011 NATO war that killed former dictator Muammar Qadhafi and plunged the country into chaos.

In response to this mass migration, the E.U. created the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean, or EUNAVFOR Med, also known as Operation Sophia.

The E.U. says the program was created to “fight human smugglers and traffickers,” but rights experts say this is a deceptive excuse for Europe to reject refugees and migrants who, under international law, likely have legitimate grounds to apply for asylum.

Likely illegal

NATO’s announcement comes just weeks after the E.U. and Turkey reached a plan to deport refugees and migrants back to Turkey. Human rights experts blasted this program, warning it likely violates international humanitarian law.

Salon spoke with Bill Frelick, refugee rights program director at Human Rights Watch, who said NATO’s plan to blockade Libya in order to stem the refugee flow also likely violates international humanitarian law.

“There’s no way that Libya even comes close to being a viable partner through which you could say that asylum-seekers could be returned there without thorough examination of their claims in the European Union,” Frelick explained.

This is the model that is being used to justify returning refugees to Turkey. At Human Rights Watch, experts already “challenge vehemently and completely disagree with” this assessment on Turkey, Frelick said, “but with regard to Libya, it’s hard to imagine there being any discussion or any difference of interpretation whatsoever.”

“I don’t want to get Turkey off the hook here, but Libya, by no stretch of the imagination could anyone reasonably argue that this is a safe country or a country that wouldn’t expose returnees to inhuman or degrading treatment,” the Human Rights Watch official said.

In Libya, you “barely have any kind of central authority that you could nominally point to as a partner,” he added, stressing that refugees there could not in any way be assured the protections they are guaranteed under international law.

In the years since the disastrous 2011 NATO war, a brutal civil war has waged on in Libya. Thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and there is no functioning government in much of the country.

Rival militias control various parts of Libya, and extremist groups have carved out large swaths of territory. ISIS has established in the North African nation its biggest self-proclaimed caliphate outside of Iraq and Syria.