UN Security Council approves the appointment of new international envoy to Libya

CAIRO -17 January 2020: Diplomats said the UN Security Council approved the appointment of Jan Kubis, a veteran Slovak diplomat as the UN envoy to Libya, nearly a year after the former envoy resigned.

António Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations, had nominated Kubis to succeed Ghassan Salameh, who resigned from the post last March due to stress.

Later, Salama's deputy, Stephanie Williams, assumed the position of Acting International Envoy to Libya.

He was a former Foreign Minister of Slovakia and is currently working as the United Nations Special Coordinator in Lebanon. Earlier, he was the UN envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kubis’s appointment comes after the Security Council approved Guterres’s plan last month to appoint Bulgarian diplomat Nikolai Mladenov as an envoy to Libya, but Mladenov told the Secretary-General a week later that he would not be able to take over the mission for personal and family reasons.