During a press conference on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas claimed that “The new naval and air mission of the European Union to monitor the arms embargo imposed on Libya does not require a separate decision by the Security Council as the necessary international legal basis already exists.”
The FM said that “The [EU] mission we are talking about is based on the current Security Council Resolution in 2016 which was also extended to 2019, so we firmly believe that there is a legal basis, consequently, a separate UN Security Council resolution is not necessary.”
This counters the viewpoint of Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who stressed that the UN Security Council needed to approve the EU’s new mission to monitor the arms embargo imposed on Libya.