The European Union agreed on Thursday to mandate a mission called “Operation Irini” in order to help secure the implementation of the UN arms embargo on Libya.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP), the ambassadors of the 27 European Union nations agreed in Brussels that the new mission should monitor the ban from the air via satellites and also from the sea.
The EU foreign ministers already agreed in principle to the mission in last February. The mission will replace “Operation Sophia”, which will be terminated at the end of March 2020.
However, the agreement on the new mission reached on Thursday faced several obstacles before approval, as the maritime part of the new mission was particularly controversial among the EU ministers.
Some countries were concerned that such a maritime mission could lead to more immigrants flowing from Africa to Europe because they expect to be rescued.
The EU foreign ministers took these concerns into consideration, thus they decided not to deploy ships in the Mediterranean but to deploy them much further to the east of Libya away from smuggling routes, for example off Benghazi or the Suez Canal.
In the meantime, Hungary and Austria initially suspended negotiations in the past few weeks due to the questions that had been raised about which countries would accommodate the people who would be rescued and where they should be disembarked first.
The ships participating in Operation Irene will move to the Libyan eastern region to avoid migration routes and therefore will not have to save anyone, in addition to monitoring the arms embargo.
After the Berlin conference on Libya in last January, the European Union agreed to oversee the UN arms embargo that has been imposed on the country since 2011, which has been largely ineffective so far.
At the Berlin conference, 16 countries agreed to stop foreign interference in the Libyan conflict. However, violations of the arms embargo continued.
