The Libya secret executions the world can no longer ignore

At least 31 people have been executed in eastern Libya since late August, following secret military trials that rights monitors describe as grossly unfair, according to Human Rights Watch. The killings are the first known executions in the country since 2010, and at least 50 more detainees held at Gernada military prison now face imminent execution, the group warned on October 14. The forces responsible are the Libyan Arab Armed Forces, the faction led by General Khalifa Haftar that controls eastern and southern Libya. The Libya secret executions have drawn condemnation from the United Nations and Libya's internationally recognized government in Tripoli, turning a long-simmering legal crisis into an urgent international one.

The firing squads started with an announcement. The LAAF's military prosecutor said on August 23 that ten people convicted of murder and terrorism-related offenses had been put to death. Monitors documented further killings through early September, and the total rights groups now cite makes this the country's first recorded wave of executions in more than a decade and a half. The Libya secret executions began drawing wider attention only when the scale became impossible to dismiss.

Trials held in secret

Many of those executed were arrested in Derna and Benghazi during or after the armed conflict between the LAAF and rival armed groups that ran from 2014 to 2018, Human Rights Watch said. In the years that followed, military courts convicted hundreds of civilians in secret trials aimed at real or perceived critics of the LAAF, sentencing at least 22 of them to death. Amnesty International says many of those sentences rested on confessions allegedly extracted under torture by the Internal Security Agency, an armed group affiliated with the LAAF. In at least two cases, a higher military court reduced death sentences to life imprisonment on appeal in 2019, yet the defendants were put to death this year regardless, with no clear legal basis for the Libya secret executions. "The Libyan Arab Armed Forces are putting people to death after secret trials built on confessions allegedly extracted through torture, in courts that Libya's own Supreme Court has said should not be trying civilians," said Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

The trials themselves rest on contested legal ground. In November 2025, Libya's Supreme Court struck down the provision that allowed military courts to try civilians for terrorism-related and state-security offenses, yet military proceedings continued anyway. Rights groups say verdicts were issued without written, reasoned judgments, and several defendants were denied lawyers of their choosing while others could not meet privately with the counsel assigned to them. The legal foundation for the Libya secret executions, the monitors argue, collapsed before the firing squads ever assembled.

A joint plea to stop the next executions

On October 12, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, Libya Crimes Watch and the World Organisation Against Torture sent a joint letter to the ambassadors and heads of mission of seven countries, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Germany and the United States, as well as the European Union delegation, urging urgent diplomatic action. The letter asks eastern Libyan authorities to halt all executions immediately and declare an official moratorium, as first steps toward abolishing the death penalty. It documents a pattern of abuse running through the arrests, detention and trials: civilians tried before military courts, lawyers threatened and blocked from case files, and confessions extracted under torture or coercion, alongside arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and ill-treatment. The coalition warns that the Libya secret executions documented so far are only the beginning unless diplomacy intervenes. The full joint letter is published on the ICJ website.

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya said it was gravely concerned that more than 30 individuals had been executed in eastern Libya in recent weeks, calling on the authorities to suspend further executions immediately. Libya's Tripoli-based Government of National Unity condemned the killings as well. According to rights groups, the cruelty extended beyond the courtroom: families were not told in advance that their relatives would die, authorities refused to hand over the bodies, the dead were buried without relatives present, and families were warned not to hold funerals. For the families of the condemned, the Libya secret executions have meant grief compounded by silence.

Human Rights Watch is calling on the LAAF to halt every scheduled execution and impose a moratorium on the death penalty, and on governments with influence over Haftar's forces to press hard for both. The group also wants military courts restricted to offenses committed by military personnel, with civilian cases moved to civilian courts and past convictions reviewed. Its position is that the death penalty should be abolished in all countries and under all circumstances, a stance now reflected in the 92 states that have ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Whether the Libya secret executions continue may depend on how quickly that pressure arrives.