Europe’s leaders are hailing the release on Tuesday of the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian Arab medic who languished for eight years in a Libyan prison on charges of having infected more than 400 Libyan children with the AIDS virus. But what we’ve just seen is a shakedown by Colonel Gadhafi’s regime, which gained from Europe $1 million for each of the affected Libyan families, along with aid to improve the hospital facility in which the children were infected, aid for education, aid for historical antiquities, and promises to allow Libyan goods easy access to European markets.

The real test for Mr. Gadhafi is when will he get around to freeing the Libyans. Libya received the lowest marks possible in the most recent edition of Freedom House’s annual ratings of political freedoms and civil rights in world nations. The press-freedom watchdog group Reporters Without Borders concluded in a report on Libya in 2006 that the Gadhafi dictatorship is “one of the world’s most repressive regimes as regards civil liberties.”

The regime’s victims include, to name but a few, a cyber-dissident, Abdel Razak al-Mansouri, who was imprisoned for posting criticisms of the regime on the Internet, and a journalist, Daif Al Ghazal, who was tortured, then murdered by agents of the regime, after speaking harshly about the Revolutionary Committees Movement. Al Ghazal’s body was found with marks of torture; another journalist, Abdullah Ali al-Sanusi al-Darrat, has spent more time in prison than any other journalist in the world. His whereabouts are unknown, and he is presumed dead.

Libya’s most famous democratic dissident, Fathi El Jahmi, who has called for free elections and a free press in Libya, was imprisoned just days after talks began to normalize relations between America and Libya. Although pressure from President Bush secured his release briefly in March 2004, Mr. El Jahmi’s continued calls for democratic reforms in Libya resulted in his reincarceration a mere week later. Mr. El Jahmi is currently in detention. All this is necessary because of Mr. Gadhafi’s declared goal of subsuming all of Europe and America under a Muslim Caliphate, which he articulated last year in an interview with Al Jazeera, where he warned Europe and America: “They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time, or else declare war on the Muslims.”