Ambassador says US analysis of Turkey-Libya deal ‘very different’ from Ankara’s
US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt was quoted by the Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Thursday as saying that an analysis by American experts of a controversial memorandum of understanding between Ankara and the Tripoli-based Libyan government presents “very different” legal conclusions to those presented by Turkey.
“The US legal judgement that the Turkish government in its assertions regarding maritime claims and specifically continental shelves differs with our legal analysis and also the UNCLOS legal analysis regarding the status of islands, that is that inhabited islands as a matter of customary international law are entitled to the same treatment as continental territory,” Pyatt said, according to his full comments, published on the US Embassy website on Friday.
“We would have a very different legal analysis from that that you’ve heard out of Ankara and that further informs our view that the right way to approach these kinds of issues is not through unilateral declarations that overlook the perspectives of the other affected states, in this case Egypt and Greece, but rather through dialogue,” the American envoy added.
“We remain of the view that we want the Eastern Mediterranean to be a zone of economic cooperation and opportunity and we want all of the issues, including energy, to be a driver of new cooperative frameworks,” Pyatt said.
