LUXEMBOURG, 12 October 2004 — EU foreign ministers agreed to lift an arms embargo on Libya yesterday, despite fears for Bulgarian and Palestinian medical workers sentenced to death there, but imposed a visa ban on senior officials from Myanmar.
At a meeting that illustrated conflicting pressures on the EU on sanctions and human rights, the ministers failed to reach consensus on lifting an arms embargo imposed on China after the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
“European Union foreign ministers have just agreed on a full lifting of the EU-Libya arms embargo,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters. “This follows our assessment that Libya has done all that we asked of it in respect of the complete abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction program.”
The decision also followed compensation paid by Libya to the victims of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin and two mid-air bombings in the 1980s, Straw said. “We remain very concerned indeed about the plight of the Bulgarian and also the Palestinian defendants in the blood case in Libya and we have agreed that we will continue to press the Libyans very hard in respect of those defendants,” he said. Libya is holding five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor under sentence of death on charges of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with the deadly HIV virus.
The EU agreed to lift the arms embargo imposed in 1986 in response to pleas from Italy, which wants to supply Libya with equipment to help it crack down on illegal migration.
While lifting sanctions on Libya, ministers imposed a visa ban on senior officials in Myanmar’s military junta for its record on human rights, and especially for its continued detention of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.
The EU agreed the sanctions against Myanmar at their last meeting in September, saying they would be imposed automatically if Yangon did not ease human rights restrictions.
Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency, announced last week that Myanmar had not met the terms. The bloc has been restoring ties with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi since he paid compensation for the bombings and renounced weapons of mass destruction, but it is embarrassed by the case of the nurses.
“We are very concerned about the situation on the Bulgarian citizens,” Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters. “We are going to consider how we can make some demarche and some clear message to the Libyan authorities ... that they have to move in the right direction.”
An EU official said the bloc was preparing a humanitarian mission to support people in Libya suffering from HIV - although the EU insists there is no link between the mission and the nurses’ fate.
