Gender Quotas Database

The percentage of women is calculated from the current number of seats occupied in the parliament. The House of Representatives has 200 statutory seats. 

The revised electoral system featuring gender parity principles was the first of its kind for Libya and proved to have a significant positive effect, resulting in a substantial increase in the number of women in the parliament. In particular, during the 2012 legislative elections, 545 women candidates were nominated by political parties, compared to 662 male candidates. However, only 85 women ran as individual candidates out of a total of 2,501. This very low number of individual women candidates confirmed the fact that when not obliged by law, the inclusion of women in party lists represented only 3 per cent of the total number of candidates running individually, whereas when the law required that women be placed vertically and horizontally on the party lists, they formed 45 per cent of the total number of party candidates. ‘When the political entities were running in more than one constituency, the horizontal gender alternation benefited women candidates. On the other hand, there was no impact on women's representation when the gender shift was applied vertically, if the party list gained only one seat in the respective constituency and women were not placed on top of the lists' (European Union Electoral Observation Mission 2012: 25). Three party lists running in only one constituency placed women candidates at the top.

At the sub-national level, the Council of Ministers recently adopted a decision providing for three different categories of candidates for municipal elections: general candidates, women candidates and former revolutionaries with special needs, all of whom should be elected by a majority system. However, the decision does not contain any specific provisions on the required percentage of women candidates or any other mechanisms to ensure that a certain percentage of women are eventually elected in Municipal Councils.