São Paulo – Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was asked to reopen the Brazilian Embassy in Libya by the Chairman of Libya’s Presidential Council, Mohammed Al-Menfi. The bilateral meeting was the Brazilian president’s last appointment before returning on Sunday (18) to Brazil from Ethiopia, where he participated in the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government of the African Union in the country.
According to information from the Brazilian President’s Office, the request will be analyzed by the Brazilian government. The Office says that Brazil established an embassy in Tripoli in 1974, and over the course of the 1970s, the relationship was concentrated in the economics department. Over the 1980s and 1990s, the bilateral relations cooled. The rapprochement started in the 2000s, as the United Nations lifted their sanctions on the country.
In 2014, in the wake of crisis in Libya that started in 2011, the Brazilian embassy in Tripoli was temporarily transferred to Tunisian capital Tunis, a situation that persists until now. According to the Brazilian President’s Office, Brazil endorsed the signing in 2015 of the Libyan Political Agreement which recognized the Government of National Accord.
Translation by Guilherme Miranda
