Libya's Parliament Backs Maritime Deal With Turkey, Deepening Rift With Greece

Libya's parliament unanimously approved a maritime agreement with Turkey on Tuesday, creating a direct economic corridor between the two countries. The decision is expected to sharpen tensions in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly with Greece.

Turkey first agreed on the corridor in 2019 with the UN-recognized Government of National Accord in western Libya. The rival government in the country's east opposed the deal at the time. The eastern parliament has now reversed that position, and Turkey's Foreign Ministry welcomed the vote.

The corridor links Turkey's southern coast with Libya's northern coast. Large oil and gas deposits have recently been found in the area, and estimates suggest natural gas reserves worth several hundred billion US dollars could lie under the seabed. Ankara and Tripoli want to secure their economic rights to these resources and exploit them jointly.

The planned corridor ignores Greek islands including Crete, Karpathos and Rhodes. Athens says it holds a comprehensive exclusive economic zone around those islands and has announced its opposition. Greece's Foreign Ministry said on X that it firmly rejects the accord with the backing of the European Union, which it said has called the memorandum "null and void" because it violates the sovereign rights of third states and is inconsistent with the Law of the Sea.

Kaja Kallas, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, struck a similar tone. She wrote on X that she had raised the Libyan vote and stressed that it "infringes upon the sovereign rights of third states."

At the heart of the dispute is whose claims are legitimate. Greece relies chiefly on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, whose Article 121 gives inhabited islands that "support an economic life of their own" the same EEZ rights as mainland territory. Athens says this covers Crete, Rhodes and Lesbos, and it points to a 2022 International Court of Justice ruling involving Colombia and Nicaragua, which held that overlapping interests require a fair demarcation weighing coastlines, geography and the effects of any boundary.

Turkey argues that Mediterranean geography deserves special weight. If every small Greek island near the Turkish and Cypriot coasts received a full EEZ, it says, Turkey would be largely cut off from the open sea. Ankara never signed the convention and so does not accept arbitration by a UN tribunal, and even legal experts disagree about what a fair division would look like here.

The politics in Libya have shifted considerably since 2019, when civil war was raging and Turkey intervened militarily to support the Tripoli government and repel an offensive by eastern General Khalifa Hifter. A Turkish charm offensive has since brought a rapprochement with Hifter's camp. Turkish firms have won contracts worth billions for reconstruction, and Turkey's state oil company TPAO is working with Libya's National Oil Corporation on plans for seismic surveys off the coast. Turkey also supplies weapons and training to Hifter's forces, pushing back against Egyptian and Russian influence in the east.

The agreement also threatens the planned EastMed pipeline, meant to carry gas from Israel and Cyprus through Greece to bolster EU energy security, since the new corridor cuts across its route. Turkey has argued that cable or pipeline projects on its claimed continental shelf need its consent. Over the long term, the region could split into two blocs: a Turkey-Libya axis and an EU-supported grouping of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel.