(Beirut) – The Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), which controls eastern and southern Libya, has executed at least 31 people since late August 2026 following grossly unfair military trials, Human Rights Watch said today. These are the first known executions in Libya since 2010, with at least 50 more people in Gernada military prison at imminent risk of execution.
On August 23, the LAAF military prosecutor announced that 10 people had been executed by firing squad after being convicted of murder and terrorism-related offenses. Human rights groups have documented a total of at least 31 executions as of September 10. The LAAF, led by General Khalifa Haftar, should immediately halt all executions and impose a moratorium on the death penalty, Human Rights Watch said.
“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. “Every execution carried out under these conditions is an irreversible injustice and every government with influence over the LAAF should be pressing hard to stop the next one.”
Many of those executed had been arrested in the cities of Derna and Benghazi during or after the armed conflict between the LAAF and opposing armed groups between 2014 and 2018. Between 2018 and 2021, military courts in eastern Libya convicted hundreds of civilians in secret trials targeting real or perceived critics of the LAAF, sentencing at least 22 to death.
According to Amnesty International, many of the sentences were based on confessions allegedly extracted under torture by the Internal Security Agency, an LAAF-affiliated armed group. At least two death sentences were reduced to life in prison on appeal by a higher military court in 2019, yet the defendants were put to death this year regardless.
The executions also went ahead despite a November 2025 ruling by the constitutional chamber of Libya’s Supreme Court that Law No. 4/2017 is unconstitutional insofar as it grants military courts jurisdiction to try civilians for terrorism and crimes against the state.
Local human rights groups said that the military trials violated defendants’ due process rights. They were held in secret and without prior notice. Defendants’ families, journalists, and human rights organizations were not allowed to attend. Several defendants were denied lawyers of their choice and those who did have their own lawyers were refused visits before and during trial and could not speak with them privately. They were apparently not allowed to present their cases in court or examine the evidence against them. The verdicts were handed down without providing the defendants or their attorneys with written and reasoned judgments.
Trying civilians in military courts is incompatible with the right to a fair trial under human rights law and such trials violate the right to be tried before an independent and impartial tribunal. In Libya, military prosecutors are often not qualified to investigate civilians and they lack independence. The military prosecutors and judges in eastern Libya are themselves affiliated with the LAAF or allied armed groups.
Families of defendants were not notified in advance that the executions would take place. The authorities refused to hand over the bodies of those executed, asked relatives to confirm the identities of the dead, then buried them without families present and warned relatives not to hold funerals. Secret executions and denying families a last visit violate international law, including by inflicting severe mental suffering on those executed and their relatives in breach of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.
Libya remains split between two rival authorities. The Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), which is internationally recognized, controls the west, alongside affiliated security agencies and armed groups. The LAAF and affiliated forces and militias control the east and south. Both sides operate with near-total impunity.
The United Nations and the GNU condemned the executions. Governments that fund, train, and legitimize the LAAF have real leverage, and a responsibility to use it, publicly and privately, to press LAAF leaders to halt all executions, Human Rights Watch said.
Libya’s justice sector is fragmented and deeply polarized. Human Rights Watch has previously documented outdated and repressive legislation, a lack of fair trial rights, and rampant due process violations. Unaccountable militias control prisons that are only nominally under state ministries.
Libyan authorities in both the east and west should restrict the jurisdiction of military courts to military offenses committed by military personnel and stop trying civilians in military courts altogether. They should promptly review all cases of civilians wrongfully detained and prosecuted before military courts and provide effective remedies, including release, transfer to civilian courts, or retrial in line with international fair trial standards, with acknowledgment of time served.
Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all countries and under all circumstances because it is inherently inhumane, uniquely cruel and irreversible, and universally plagued by arbitrariness, prejudice, and error. Ninety-two countries have ratified a protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that requires the abolition of the death penalty, recognizing that capital punishment violates the right to life and the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment. Libya should abolish the death penalty and until then enact a moratorium on all executions.
“Libya went more than 15 years without an execution, and the LAAF has shattered that moratorium in a matter of weeks,” Khawaja said. “The lives of at least 50 more people now depend on whether Haftar’s forces, and the governments that back them, choose to stop this.”
