The Egyptian and Greek foreign ministers on Sunday ruled “illegal” the memorandum on prospecting for hydrocarbons in Libyan waters, signed last week between the Libyan government based in Tripoli and Turkey, three years after a controversial maritime delimitation agreement.
Greece and Egypt deny Turkey the right to explore for hydrocarbons in Libyan waters amid disagreement over maritime boundaries. “This agreement threatens stability and security in the Mediterranean,” Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias said in Cairo. Tripoli does not have the necessary sovereignty over this area to seal such an agreement which is therefore illegal and inadmissible”. He insists: “We will use all legal means to defend our rights”.
His Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Choukri, does not say anything different: with an “expired” mandate, “the Tripoli government does not have the legitimacy to sign agreements. Since March, two rival governments have been vying for power in Libya, which has been in chaos since the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The head of the Libyan government based in Tripoli, Abdelhamid Dbeibah, last week defended this agreement: “The Turkish-Libyan memorandum is based on bilateral agreements concluded before 2011. It is our right to sign any cooperation agreement with other countries”.
The memorandum of understanding signed last Monday in Tripoli by a high-level Turkish delegation comes after the signing of a maritime delimitation agreement in 2019 through which Ankara asserts rights over large areas in the eastern Mediterranean. Greece and Egypt but also Cyprus believe that this agreement violates their economic rights in a sector where vast gas fields have been discovered in recent years.
Hydrocarbons and Turkey : A maritime delimitation denounced by Europe
The European Union has been denouncing the new maritime delimitation since 2019 and Paris has judged the memorandum between Tripoli and Ankara “not in accordance with international law”. In return for the 2019 agreement, Turkey had helped the government in Tripoli to repel an offensive in June 2020 by its rival, Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a strongman in eastern Libya, to take the capital. Ankara had sent military advisers and drones, inflicting a series of defeats on the marshal’s forces backed by Russia and Ankara’s regional rivals, including the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
Last Friday, France indicated that it had “taken note” of the hydrocarbon prospecting agreement in Libyan waters signed with Turkey, judging it “not in accordance with international law of the sea”. Paris’ position on this “memorandum of understanding (…) remains unchanged,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement. “This infringes the sovereign rights of Member States of the European Union, does not comply with the international law of the sea and cannot have legal consequences for third States”.
