Nov. 8 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The NGOs Human Right Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have denounced this Tuesday that 19 Saharawi activists are languishing in prison years after being sentenced by Moroccan courts in “unfair procedures”.
Both organizations have pointed out that the convictions of members of the Gdeim Izik group have stemmed from their alleged role in the deadly violence that erupted on November 8, 2010, when Moroccan police dismantled a protest camp in Western Sahara.
The trials were marred by a heavy reliance on “confessions” which the defendants repudiated as being obtained through torture.
“Nineteen men have now spent 12 years in prison, with years yet to serve, after trials that were largely based on tainted confessions,” said HRW’s Middle East director Lama Fakih.
“The passage of time has only increased the injustice in this case,” added Fakih, lamenting the situation.
HRW and AI have recalled that the United Nations body of experts on torture condemned violations of the Convention against Torture last year in three cases related to those accused of Gdeim Izik, questioning “the probative value” of the investigations of the Moroccan judiciary.
On November 8, 2010, the Moroccan security forces proceeded to dismantle the Gdeim Izik camp, which consisted of some 6,500 tents that the Saharawis had erected a month earlier near El Ayoun, in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, to protest their social and economic conditions.
The resulting violent clashes in the camp and in El Ayoun killed 11 security agents, according to Moroccan officials, as well as three civilians.
Likewise, HRW has emphasized that the Moroccan security forces repeatedly beat and ill-treated the people they arrested immediately afterwards.
Yet, in a November 2021 ruling on a complaint filed by a Gdeim Izik defendant, Mohamed Bourial, the UN Committee Against Torture criticized the appeals court’s torture investigations, both for being slow and not comply with the Istanbul Protocol, a set of guidelines for investigating and documenting allegations of torture.
The United Nations committee noted that “the State has far exceeded the reasonable time to deliver justice in the author’s case 11 years after the events and the filing of the first complaints of torture.”
Most of Western Sahara, a non-autonomous territory according to the UN, has been under de facto Moroccan control since it seized the territory from Spain, its former colonial administrator, in 1975.
The Moroccan government considers it its territory and rejects demands for a vote on self-determination that would include independence as an option. That option was included in the referendum that Morocco and the Polisario Front, the Western Sahara liberation movement, agreed to in a 1991 UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.
“Moroccan authorities systematically prevent meetings in Western Sahara in support of Saharawi self-determination. Morocco obstructs the work of some local human rights NGOs, including harassing their members and blocking legal registration processes, and sometimes beating activists and journalists in their custody and on the streets,” HRW said in its statement.
“The continued imprisonment of the Gdeim Izik group on the basis of tainted evidence shows that when it comes to those who oppose the Moroccan government over Western Sahara, a fair trial is a pipe dream,” said the deputy director of the Middle East and Africa of the North at Amnesty International, Amna Guellali.
