Will Libya’s judicial divorce bury the UNSMIL roadmap for good? |
The ink on UNSMIL’s latest political roadmap is barely dry, yet the United Nations mission is already sounding the alarm over a “constitutional division” that threatens to tear the country’s last unified institution—the judiciary—asunder. The recent escalations between Tripoli and Benghazi over the Supreme Court’s legitimacy are not merely technical disagreements; they are a calculated veto against the electoral process.
However, the international community’s response remains stagnant. Major foreign players in the Libyan file appear to have overlooked the gravity of this judicial collapse, their attention diverted by the latest twists of Trumpism and a shifting global order. By allowing the UN sponsored Structured Dialogue to be threatened by legal hurdles, these powers are once again watching as Libya’s transition is buried under a mountain of “constitutional amendments” that lead nowhere.
Until this past month, Libya had managed a fragile, almost miraculous, functional unity despite its deep political fissures. While the country has long been bifurcated between a UN-recognized government in Tripoli and an unrecognized parallel administration in Benghazi, it remained anchored by four supposedly independent and unified institutions: The Central Bank, the judiciary, the High National Elections Commission (HNEC), and the National Oil Corporation (NOC), along with a shared, albeit strained, framework for law enforcement—applicable mostly to the ordinary but excepts the elite. These pillars allowed the daily life of the state to bypass the political theatre. However, as 2026 begins, this technical unity is collapsing—at least threatened. The “endless legal battles” currently erupting over the control of the Supreme Court and the management of the elections commission (HNEC) are now threatening to........