The European Union (EU) has agreed on the deployment of warships in the Mediterranean Sea, a move that seeks to uphold the United Nations (UN) arms embargo on Libya. Josep Borrell, the bloc’s Minister of Foreign Affairs announced the agreement reached on Monday 17, February 2020.

On February 26th 2011, the UN Security Council (UNSC) agreed unanimously, in Security Council Resolution 1970 sanctions against Libya, including an open-ended ban on the supply of arms and military equipment to and from Libya. The sanctions were imposed in reaction to the gross and systematic violation of human rights, including the repression of peaceful demonstrators by the Libyan government in the weeks preceding the sanctions. 

However, from September 2011, the sanctions allowed supplies of arms to the new Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), if approved by the Sanctions Committee. They also accommodated temporary exports for the use of UN personnel, the media and humanitarian and development workers.

The North African country is currently in a civil war that started 10 months ago when the self-styled military government of General Khalifa Haftar carried a march on Tripoli, the country’s capital which is headed by the UN-backed Fayez al-Sarraj. Thousands of people have lost their lives and interest in the war has escalated beyond the four walls of the oil-producing country. Foreign powers scramble to take sides with either faction, providing them with arms and resulting in a proxy war that seems hard to end. Russian mercenaries, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are fully in support of Haftar, while Turkey supports the government with soldiers and weapons.

The new agreement by the EU seeks to stop this illegal movement of arms with an intention to stop the war. According to Borrell, the 27 foreign ministers making up the European bloc agreed to launch a new mission around Libya’s waterways known as “Operation EU Active Surveillance,” scheduled to commence at the end of March 2020.

The new mission will involve the use of naval ships, planes and satellites in the sea to prevent the shipment of arms to Libya’s warring factions. The warships will patrol about 60 miles off the coast of Libya and would be deployed along routes where arms shipments have been known to have travelled.

Speaking on the agreement, Austrian Foreign Minister, Alexander Schallenberg, stated his contentment with the new plan. “I believe we achieved a good fundamental consensus today,” he said, adding that “it will be a completely new mission, a new operational area, a new mandate with a clear focus on the arms embargo and clear safeguards against misuse by human traffickers.”

But the EU does not expect to be involved in rescuing shipwrecked immigrants, an internal memo released by the London-based civil liberties group Statewatch, said. “Naval assets can be deployed in the areas most relevant to the implementation of the arms embargo, in the eastern part of the area of operation or at least 100km off the Libyan coast, where chances to conduct rescue operations are lower,” it reads. This indicates that the mission would not serve as a “pull factor” for asylum seekers while the ships from the new mission will also be withdrawn if a “pull” effect is observed.