A man has been sentenced to death in Libya after converting from Islam to Christianity, according to local news reports.
Details are scarce, but Dhiaa al-Din Ahmed Miftah Balao – described as an information technology graduate – appears to have previously been a devoted Muslim and...
Blog archive: Libya
-
17th September 2022
-
10th June 2020The UN's latest report on the coronavirus situation in Libya makes grim reading. Just about everything that could go wrong is going wrong. None of it is helped by the ongoing conflict between the UN-backed Government of National Unity (GNA) in Tripoli and Field Marshall Haftar's forces based...
-
15th May 2020Unidentified militiamen entered the intensive care unit at al-Jala hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi on Sunday and opened fire. Medical staff escaped with their lives but seven respirators were badly damaged, along with an ultrasound machine and several monitors. In Libya's internal...
-
25th April 2020So far, Libya has only 61 confirmed cases of Covid-19 but limited capacity for testing means an unknown number of infections are going undetected. At the same time, Libya faces a series of additional problems that make tackling the virus more difficult. The country is now in its ninth year of...
-
19th October 2018A lobbyist who has received at least $120,000 for PR activities on behalf of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar is one of the scheduled speakers at a controversial meeting to be held in the House of Lords later this month. The meeting, billed as a discussion on postwar "reconstruction and...
-
5th September 2017A public relations firm which became notorious for assisting dodgy regimes – including several in the Middle East – has finally got its comeuppance. London-based Bell Pottinger has been expelled from the PRCA (the trade body for "respectable" PR firms) for bringing the industry into...
-
29th January 2017Donald Trump ended his first week as president by signing an executive order that means citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen will not be allowed to enter the United States. Although the travel ban is one of a series of measures aimed – according to Trump – at "...
-
1st April 2016As efforts continue to establish a single national government in Libya, a report by a UN panel of experts which was circulated last month provides some illuminating background: Throughout most of 2015, conflicting regional interests further polarised the political scene....
-
4th September 2014Libya's Constitutional Drafting Assembly has set up an online poll asking people what system of government they would prefer – monarchical, presidential or parliamentary – and the results, if they reflect public opinion at all accurately, are rather alarming. With more than 23,000...
-
2nd August 2014The "bitter truth", according to a headline in the Daily Mail this week, is that Iraq and Libya "were better off under the tyrants toppled by an arrogant and naive west". In the article below, columnist Stephen Glover asked: "Where would you prefer to try to live a half-normal life...
-
18th November 2013All militias from the Libyan city of Misrata have been told to leave the capital, Tripoli, within 72 hours, and "without exception", the BBC reports this morning. The Libya Herald says the withdrawal call came from members of Misrata’s shura council, local elders and...
-
29th July 2013Libya is about to embark on the drafting of a new constitution. Depending on how this process is handled, it can either stimulate a constructive debate about the future system of government and move the country forward from the Gaddafi era, or it can simply exacerbate existing divisions...
