Editor’s Note: Andrea Cellino is Vice President at MEIS, the Middle East Institute Switzerland, and Non-Resident Executive Fellow at GCSP, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. From 2015-2023, he was the Head of the North Africa Desk at DCAF, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, managing operations in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.
An Italian and Swiss national, Andrea holds a MA in Political Science from the University of Torino and a Master’s in Contemporary History from the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Scientific Board of the NATO Defence College Foundation as well as a member of the Italian Institute of International Affairs (IAI) and of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo (IIHL).
By Hafed Al-Ghwell, Senior Fellow and Director, North Africa Program
Fifteen years after the fall of Gaddafi, the European Union finds itself in a paradox of its own making in Libya. It is the country’s largest donor, having channeled hundreds of millions of euros through the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTFA) and the NDICI-Global Europe instrument, and yet it wields almost no political influence over Libya’s future. Brussels has a naval mission in the Mediterranean, trains coastguard forces, funds rule-of-law programs, and finances skills development schemes — and yet Russia maintains a permanent military footprint in the country’s east, Turkey retains troops and bases in the west, and the UAE continues to back Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army with arms and political support. The EU, in short, has traded geopolitical relevance for the comforting illusion of technical manageability.
From Mediator to Manager
The turning point came gradually. After the Berlin Conference of January 2020 — the last instance when the EU genuinely tried to convene the major actors around a common roadmap — Brussels allowed its diplomatic ambitions to wither. The UN-brokered Government of National Unity (GNU) that emerged from the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in February 2021 offered a convenient exit: Responsibility for the political process was handed entirely to UNSMIL, while the EU settled into the role of a supporter and service provider. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sealed this retreat, dramatically reshuffling the EU’s strategic priorities and providing institutional cover for what had already become a policy of deliberate depoliticization. EU officials with direct responsibility for the Libyan file have since confirmed that the step back from political engagement was a conscious choice, driven by persistent divisions among member states that made any common political position effectively impossible to agree upon.
What followed was an acceleration of the technocratic turn. The EU’s assistance, channeled through UN agencies (UNDP, IOM) or national cooperation managers (GIZ, Expertise France), concentrated on high-visibility, rapidly measurable interventions: de-mining, infrastructure rehabilitation, local governance support, civil society hubs in municipalities. The most recent Special Measure for 2024 — the latest iteration of this approach — allocates €7.15 million to a private-sector skills program and €8 million to a justice and rule-of-law project, which the High Representative Kaja Kallas described as targeting “juvenile justice, rule of law institutions, and the fight against corruption.” These are not trivial activities. But they are also not a strategy. The European Court of Auditors noted in 2024 that EU support to Libya had remained “not sufficiently targeted,” distributed across too wide a range of actions without a clear hierarchy of priorities. The head of the audit, Bettina Jakobsen, was more blunt: The result was “fragmented support with little focus on strategic priorities” that “fails to produce an impact.”
Migration Externalization and Its Political Costs
Nowhere is the technocratic evasion more consequential — or more contradictory — than in the field of migration management. The EU has, since 2017, built an elaborate architecture of border externalization: It funds, trains, and equips the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) in exchange for intercepting migrants before they reach European waters. This arrangement has been dressed in the neutral language of “capacity-building,” “integrated border management,” and “SAR coordination,” obscuring the political choices it entails.
The humanitarian costs of this approach are now beyond reasonable dispute. The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya concluded in March 2023 that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that systematic abuses in detention centers — including torture, sexual violence, forced labor and extortion — reach the threshold of crimes against humanity, and that the EU’s support for interceptions has indirectly contributed to these crimes. The LCG units that EU resources help equip are linked to militias that profit from the detention system through embezzlement of state funds, release payments, and forced labor. Far from dismantling this system, EU cooperation has strengthened its actors, providing them with institutional cover and resources that enhance their bargaining power vis-à-vis both the Libyan governments and European partners.
The geopolitical costs are less discussed but equally serious. By subordinating every other interest to migration containment, the EU has progressively legitimized actors it previously kept at arm’s length. The most striking recent example concerns Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya. From mid-2022 onwards, thousands of migrants began departing from eastern Libya, with Haftar’s forces actively orchestrating the embarkments. Italy and Greece responded by opening political channels to the Haftar clan and initiating training programs for the Libyan National Army. In July 2025, EU Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner led a high-level delegation to Benghazi — only for Haftar to expel it when his demand to include ministers of his parallel, unrecognized government was refused. Rather than marking a clean break, the incident was followed by a Frontex and Commission visit to Warsaw and Brussels of Libyan officials from both governments in October 2025 — the first time Haftar’s representatives had been formally received by EU institutions. And in January 2026, it emerged that the EU is planning a maritime rescue coordination center in Benghazi, with initial funding of €3 million, which would provide Haftar’s coastguard with an operational base and, crucially, significant international legitimacy.
The Vacuum Russia, Turkey, and the UAE Have Filled
The consequence of EU depoliticization has been a structural vacuum that other powers have filled with far greater effectiveness. Turkey’s military intervention in 2019-2020 reversed Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli, earning Ankara a permanent military presence in western Libya and an increased degree of influence over the GNU. Russia, which supported Haftar’s offensive through the Wagner Group (now operating under the Africa Corps brand), is entrenched in eastern Libya and the broader Sahel corridor. The Panel of Experts of the UN described the arms embargo as “totally ineffective” and noted “widespread and flagrant” violations, including by Russia. The UAE has been a consistent financial and military backer of Haftar, largely undisturbed by EU diplomatic pressure. In 2025, the Haftar family conducted a systematic international legitimation campaign: Khalifa Haftar was received by Macron in Paris in February and by Putin in Moscow in May, while his son Saddam visited the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Niger. The EU’s Operation Irini, the naval mission supposed to enforce the arms embargo, has been criticized for selectively inspecting cargo while remaining cautious where inspections might interfere with migration cooperation. EU officials contest this characterization, noting structural constraints: Naval law bars the inspection of Turkish military vessels; few member states make ports available for cargo diversion; and arms flows have increasingly shifted to air transport, beyond Irini’s interdiction capacity. Yet the political perception — that Irini polices migration routes more effectively than weapons flows — has stuck and is not easily dismissed.
The UNSMIL Roadmap: A Test Europe Is Failing
In August 2025, UNSMIL Special Representative Hanna Serwaa Tetteh presented the Security Council with a new roadmap structured around three pillars: an electoral framework for presidential and parliamentary elections, institutional unification through a new government, and a structured dialogue on governance, economy, security, and reconciliation. Tetteh indicated that national elections could be held within 12 to 18 months if the roadmap is successfully implemented. The EU’s response was limited to declarations of support by the EU Delegation and member state missions in Libya, alongside general endorsements in UN fora. No specific EU political initiative has followed. The October 2025 launch of the New EU Pact for the Mediterranean, while signaling a rhetorical shift towards treating Mediterranean partners as “geopolitical actors to be managed,” offers little concrete change for Libya: The document prioritizes migration control and contains only a weak reference to human rights, good governance, and rule of law.
Recommendations: Reclaiming a Political Role
If the EU is to halt its slide into irrelevance in Libya, several reorientations are necessary.
First, develop a common EU political position on the UNSMIL roadmap. UNSMIL’s three-pillar framework offers an external scaffold the EU could more actively support rather than merely endorse. This means coordinating member state diplomatic positions around concrete benchmarks — electoral legislation, institutional unification timelines — and ending the pattern by which France, Italy, Greece, and Malta pursue separate bilateral tracks that undermine collective credibility.
Second, use SC16337 to push for executive interdiction powers for Irini. In April 2026, the Security Council passed resolution SC16337, requiring that payments for Libyan crude oil be routed exclusively through National Oil Corporation accounts at the Libyan Foreign Bank — a significant step towards closing the illicit export channels that have long undermined both the sanctions regime and Libya’s fiscal unity. With Irini’s mandate already extended until March 2027, the EU should now press for the mission’s hydrocarbon role to be upgraded from monitoring to active interdiction: The financial architecture is in place; what is missing is the enforcement capacity to give it teeth.
Third, engage eastern Libya without conferring unilateral legitimacy. Technical contacts with Haftar’s administration are pragmatically unavoidable given his control over coastline, oil infrastructure, and migration routes. But the planned Benghazi coordination center should not proceed without a clear political framework that includes commitments on human rights and alignment with the UNSMIL roadmap — conditions, not blank checks.
Fourth, build on the unified budget as economic glue. In April 2026, Libya’s rival legislative chambers approved a unified state budget for the first time since 2013 — a Libyan-owned agreement with the Central Bank as its neutral anchor. The EU should seize this opening by conditioning a meaningful share of its NDICI assistance on alignment with unified budget mechanisms, supporting public financial management and audit institutions that serve both administrations. Strengthening the NOC-Central Bank revenue-sharing nexus — the one economic arrangement both sides have an interest in preserving — gives the EU real leverage without the zero-sum dynamics that Russia, Turkey, and the UAE exploit on the security track.
Fifth, make transparency non-negotiable. The EU has never suspended assistance to Libya over documented rights violations, rendering conditionality threats hollow. All programs touching border management or detention should be subject to mandatory, independent human rights impact assessments with published findings — giving civil society and the European Parliament concrete grounds to hold the Commission to account where political will to act has consistently been absent.
The window for reclaiming political relevance in Libya is narrowing, not closed. Each year of Russian and Turkish military entrenchment and EU technical retreat makes a credible future initiative harder to launch. What the EU has demonstrated is that money, in the absence of political will, does not buy influence — it buys the appearance of engagement while others shape the facts on the ground. Reversing this requires accepting that stabilization in Libya is not a technical problem to be managed but a political challenge to be confronted, even when doing so demands difficult choices among member states that have long preferred comfortable inaction.
Header image: Visit of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity of Libya, to the European Commission. By EU Audiovisual Service
The EU’s Technocratic Trap in Libya: How Brussels Is Ceding the Mediterranean
By Andrea Cellino
Middle East & North Africa
Fifteen years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the European Union remains Libya’s largest donor — but a marginal political actor. By prioritizing technocratic interventions over strategic engagement, Brussels has ceded ground to actors like Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, who now shape realities on the ground. This commentary examines how EU migration policies, fragmented assistance, and diplomatic retreat have undermined its leverage while reinforcing problematic local power structures. It argues that without a decisive shift toward a coordinated political strategy, the EU risks permanent irrelevance in a region central to Mediterranean stability.
Editor’s Note: Andrea Cellino is Vice President at MEIS, the Middle East Institute Switzerland, and Non-Resident Executive Fellow at GCSP, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. From 2015-2023, he was the Head of the North Africa Desk at DCAF, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, managing operations in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.
An Italian and Swiss national, Andrea holds a MA in Political Science from the University of Torino and a Master’s in Contemporary History from the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Scientific Board of the NATO Defence College Foundation as well as a member of the Italian Institute of International Affairs (IAI) and of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo (IIHL).
By Hafed Al-Ghwell, Senior Fellow and Director, North Africa Program
Fifteen years after the fall of Gaddafi, the European Union finds itself in a paradox of its own making in Libya. It is the country’s largest donor, having channeled hundreds of millions of euros through the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTFA) and the NDICI-Global Europe instrument, and yet it wields almost no political influence over Libya’s future. Brussels has a naval mission in the Mediterranean, trains coastguard forces, funds rule-of-law programs, and finances skills development schemes — and yet Russia maintains a permanent military footprint in the country’s east, Turkey retains troops and bases in the west, and the UAE continues to back Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army with arms and political support. The EU, in short, has traded geopolitical relevance for the comforting illusion of technical manageability.
From Mediator to Manager
The turning point came gradually. After the Berlin Conference of January 2020 — the last instance when the EU genuinely tried to convene the major actors around a common roadmap — Brussels allowed its diplomatic ambitions to wither. The UN-brokered Government of National Unity (GNU) that emerged from the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in February 2021 offered a convenient exit: Responsibility for the political process was handed entirely to UNSMIL, while the EU settled into the role of a supporter and service provider. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sealed this retreat, dramatically reshuffling the EU’s strategic priorities and providing institutional cover for what had already become a policy of deliberate depoliticization. EU officials with direct responsibility for the Libyan file have since confirmed that the step back from political engagement was a conscious choice, driven by persistent divisions among member states that made any common political position effectively impossible to agree upon.
What followed was an acceleration of the technocratic turn. The EU’s assistance, channeled through UN agencies (UNDP, IOM) or national cooperation managers (GIZ, Expertise France), concentrated on high-visibility, rapidly measurable interventions: de-mining, infrastructure rehabilitation, local governance support, civil society hubs in municipalities. The most recent Special Measure for 2024 — the latest iteration of this approach — allocates €7.15 million to a private-sector skills program and €8 million to a justice and rule-of-law project, which the High Representative Kaja Kallas described as targeting “juvenile justice, rule of law institutions, and the fight against corruption.” These are not trivial activities. But they are also not a strategy. The European Court of Auditors noted in 2024 that EU support to Libya had remained “not sufficiently targeted,” distributed across too wide a range of actions without a clear hierarchy of priorities. The head of the audit, Bettina Jakobsen, was more blunt: The result was “fragmented support with little focus on strategic priorities” that “fails to produce an impact.”
Migration Externalization and Its Political Costs
Nowhere is the technocratic evasion more consequential — or more contradictory — than in the field of migration management. The EU has, since 2017, built an elaborate architecture of border externalization: It funds, trains, and equips the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) in exchange for intercepting migrants before they reach European waters. This arrangement has been dressed in the neutral language of “capacity-building,” “integrated border management,” and “SAR coordination,” obscuring the political choices it entails.
The humanitarian costs of this approach are now beyond reasonable dispute. The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya concluded in March 2023 that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that systematic abuses in detention centers — including torture, sexual violence, forced labor and extortion — reach the threshold of crimes against humanity, and that the EU’s support for interceptions has indirectly contributed to these crimes. The LCG units that EU resources help equip are linked to militias that profit from the detention system through embezzlement of state funds, release payments, and forced labor. Far from dismantling this system, EU cooperation has strengthened its actors, providing them with institutional cover and resources that enhance their bargaining power vis-à-vis both the Libyan governments and European partners.
The geopolitical costs are less discussed but equally serious. By subordinating every other interest to migration containment, the EU has progressively legitimized actors it previously kept at arm’s length. The most striking recent example concerns Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya. From mid-2022 onwards, thousands of migrants began departing from eastern Libya, with Haftar’s forces actively orchestrating the embarkments. Italy and Greece responded by opening political channels to the Haftar clan and initiating training programs for the Libyan National Army. In July 2025, EU Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner led a high-level delegation to Benghazi — only for Haftar to expel it when his demand to include ministers of his parallel, unrecognized government was refused. Rather than marking a clean break, the incident was followed by a Frontex and Commission visit to Warsaw and Brussels of Libyan officials from both governments in October 2025 — the first time Haftar’s representatives had been formally received by EU institutions. And in January 2026, it emerged that the EU is planning a maritime rescue coordination center in Benghazi, with initial funding of €3 million, which would provide Haftar’s coastguard with an operational base and, crucially, significant international legitimacy.
The Vacuum Russia, Turkey, and the UAE Have Filled
The consequence of EU depoliticization has been a structural vacuum that other powers have filled with far greater effectiveness. Turkey’s military intervention in 2019-2020 reversed Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli, earning Ankara a permanent military presence in western Libya and an increased degree of influence over the GNU. Russia, which supported Haftar’s offensive through the Wagner Group (now operating under the Africa Corps brand), is entrenched in eastern Libya and the broader Sahel corridor. The Panel of Experts of the UN described the arms embargo as “totally ineffective” and noted “widespread and flagrant” violations, including by Russia. The UAE has been a consistent financial and military backer of Haftar, largely undisturbed by EU diplomatic pressure. In 2025, the Haftar family conducted a systematic international legitimation campaign: Khalifa Haftar was received by Macron in Paris in February and by Putin in Moscow in May, while his son Saddam visited the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Niger. The EU’s Operation Irini, the naval mission supposed to enforce the arms embargo, has been criticized for selectively inspecting cargo while remaining cautious where inspections might interfere with migration cooperation. EU officials contest this characterization, noting structural constraints: Naval law bars the inspection of Turkish military vessels; few member states make ports available for cargo diversion; and arms flows have increasingly shifted to air transport, beyond Irini’s interdiction capacity. Yet the political perception — that Irini polices migration routes more effectively than weapons flows — has stuck and is not easily dismissed.
The UNSMIL Roadmap: A Test Europe Is Failing
In August 2025, UNSMIL Special Representative Hanna Serwaa Tetteh presented the Security Council with a new roadmap structured around three pillars: an electoral framework for presidential and parliamentary elections, institutional unification through a new government, and a structured dialogue on governance, economy, security, and reconciliation. Tetteh indicated that national elections could be held within 12 to 18 months if the roadmap is successfully implemented. The EU’s response was limited to declarations of support by the EU Delegation and member state missions in Libya, alongside general endorsements in UN fora. No specific EU political initiative has followed. The October 2025 launch of the New EU Pact for the Mediterranean, while signaling a rhetorical shift towards treating Mediterranean partners as “geopolitical actors to be managed,” offers little concrete change for Libya: The document prioritizes migration control and contains only a weak reference to human rights, good governance, and rule of law.
Recommendations: Reclaiming a Political Role
If the EU is to halt its slide into irrelevance in Libya, several reorientations are necessary.
First, develop a common EU political position on the UNSMIL roadmap. UNSMIL’s three-pillar framework offers an external scaffold the EU could more actively support rather than merely endorse. This means coordinating member state diplomatic positions around concrete benchmarks — electoral legislation, institutional unification timelines — and ending the pattern by which France, Italy, Greece, and Malta pursue separate bilateral tracks that undermine collective credibility.
Second, use SC16337 to push for executive interdiction powers for Irini. In April 2026, the Security Council passed resolution SC16337, requiring that payments for Libyan crude oil be routed exclusively through National Oil Corporation accounts at the Libyan Foreign Bank — a significant step towards closing the illicit export channels that have long undermined both the sanctions regime and Libya’s fiscal unity. With Irini’s mandate already extended until March 2027, the EU should now press for the mission’s hydrocarbon role to be upgraded from monitoring to active interdiction: The financial architecture is in place; what is missing is the enforcement capacity to give it teeth.
Third, engage eastern Libya without conferring unilateral legitimacy. Technical contacts with Haftar’s administration are pragmatically unavoidable given his control over coastline, oil infrastructure, and migration routes. But the planned Benghazi coordination center should not proceed without a clear political framework that includes commitments on human rights and alignment with the UNSMIL roadmap — conditions, not blank checks.
Fourth, build on the unified budget as economic glue. In April 2026, Libya’s rival legislative chambers approved a unified state budget for the first time since 2013 — a Libyan-owned agreement with the Central Bank as its neutral anchor. The EU should seize this opening by conditioning a meaningful share of its NDICI assistance on alignment with unified budget mechanisms, supporting public financial management and audit institutions that serve both administrations. Strengthening the NOC-Central Bank revenue-sharing nexus — the one economic arrangement both sides have an interest in preserving — gives the EU real leverage without the zero-sum dynamics that Russia, Turkey, and the UAE exploit on the security track.
Fifth, make transparency non-negotiable. The EU has never suspended assistance to Libya over documented rights violations, rendering conditionality threats hollow. All programs touching border management or detention should be subject to mandatory, independent human rights impact assessments with published findings — giving civil society and the European Parliament concrete grounds to hold the Commission to account where political will to act has consistently been absent.
The window for reclaiming political relevance in Libya is narrowing, not closed. Each year of Russian and Turkish military entrenchment and EU technical retreat makes a credible future initiative harder to launch. What the EU has demonstrated is that money, in the absence of political will, does not buy influence — it buys the appearance of engagement while others shape the facts on the ground. Reversing this requires accepting that stabilization in Libya is not a technical problem to be managed but a political challenge to be confronted, even when doing so demands difficult choices among member states that have long preferred comfortable inaction.
Header image: Visit of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity of Libya, to the European Commission. By EU Audiovisual Service
Recent & Related