Skhirat Agreement

The Skhirat Agreement, formally the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA), was signed on 17 December 2015 in the Moroccan coastal town of Skhirat under the auspices of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). It sought to resolve the institutional split that had emerged after 2014, when Libya fractured between two rival governments: the internationally recognised House of Representatives (HoR) based in Tobruk and the General National Congress (GNC) based in Tripoli.

The agreement established a transitional governance architecture comprising:

• A Presidency Council chaired by Fayez al-Sarraj, tasked with forming a unity executive.
• The Government of National Accord (GNA) as the sole legitimate executive authority.
• The House of Representatives as the legislature.
• A High Council of State, drawn largely from former GNC members, as a consultative body.

The UN Security Council endorsed the deal through Resolution 2259 (2015), and the GNA arrived in Tripoli in March 2016. However, implementation faltered. The Tobruk-based HoR never formally ratified the agreement or granted the GNA a vote of confidence, and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) rejected its authority, launching an offensive on Tripoli in April 2019.

The Skhirat framework was effectively superseded by the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) process in Tunis in November 2020, which produced a new roadmap and the Government of National Unity (GNU) under Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh in March 2021. Despite its limitations, the Skhirat Agreement remains a foundational reference point in Libyan transitional politics and is frequently cited in subsequent UN-mediated negotiations as the baseline legitimacy framework for Libya's post-conflict institutions.