Greece Moves On Libya Sea Deal

The Eastern Mediterranean’s hardest boundary dispute is being fought with coordinates, not checkpoints. On 27 July, Greek and Libyan officials finished a third round of technical talks in Athens, working through rival legal arguments about where their maritime zones should meet south of Crete (ERT, ProtoThema). The format is dry. The purpose is not. Athens is trying to draw a Greek-Libyan maritime boundary that would weaken the 2019 Turkey-Libya memorandum, the deal that treated Greek islands as little more than inconvenient dots on the map.

There is sense in the Greek strategy, but also a fairly obvious problem. It relies on Libya, a state that can barely produce a single political voice.

The memorandum Crete can't afford

In November 2019, Turkey and Libya’s Tripoli-based government signed a memorandum that treated their coastlines as if they faced each other directly. The line they drew gave Greek islands, especially Crete, almost no maritime effect. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the main treaty governing maritime boundaries, islands usually generate the same offshore zones as mainland coasts unless they are uninhabitable rocks (UNCLOS). Crete is large, inhabited and politically impossible to ignore. The memorandum more or less did just that.

EU leaders rejected the agreement within weeks. The European Council, where EU heads of state and government set the Union’s political direction, said it infringed the sovereign rights of third states and could not bind countries that had not signed it (European Council). That mattered politically. But without a rival agreement on the table, the Turkey-Libya memorandum remained in Ankara’s and Tripoli’s diplomatic armoury, continuing to shape Turkey’s claims south of Crete.

Greece's strategy and its weakest link

Greece’s answer is a slow one: keep Libya in the room and try to agree a separate bilateral boundary south of Crete. If Athens and Libya can settle on their own line, Turkey will find it harder to present the 2019 memorandum as the only operative arrangement in that stretch of sea.

The weakness is Libya itself. Since 2014, the country has been divided between rival authorities. The eastern-based House of Representatives reportedly never ratified the 2019 memorandum with Turkey, leaving its standing inside Libya contested before any international court gets near it (Ahram Weekly). Greece needs enough continuity from those rival institutions to produce coordinates that could later support a treaty or a case before the International Court of Justice.

A joint technical committee met for a second round in Tripoli on 10 June before moving to Athens for the third. The Greek account suggests the process has not yet reached agreed coordinates or a draft deal (ERT).

Turkey’s legal case is more precise than much of the politics around it. Ankara does not argue that islands never count. Its position is that international courts have sometimes reduced the maritime effect of islands where giving them full weight would create a disproportionate result, an argument with support in case law (ICJ Libya/Malta, Daily Sabah). But reducing an island’s effect is not the same as making it disappear. The 2019 memorandum sits much closer to disappearance.

Why Rome and Nicosia are watching

Italy sees Libya through two practical lenses: energy and migration. The GreenStream pipeline brings Libyan gas to Sicily, while Defence Minister Guido Crosetto and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani have both treated stability in the southern Mediterranean as a direct economic interest (Formiche).

Cyprus has the most exposed position. European energy companies are developing offshore gas fields in Cypriot waters, with production targeted from 2028 (Phileleftheros). If Turkey’s map gains credibility in one part of the Eastern Mediterranean, Nicosia’s offshore claims become easier to challenge elsewhere. Turkey has also backed the memorandum with a military presence in Libya, which makes the 2019 deal harder to displace by legal drafting alone (Les Clés du Moyen-Orient).

Athens, which is at the same time blocking the EU’s latest Russia sanctions package to protect its shipping sector, is betting that patient, technical map-making can do what political denunciation could not. Greece has a legal route. Its difficulty is that the route runs through Libya.