Moroccan authorities expel a French lawyer from Western Sahara

29 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The Moroccan authorities have expelled this Friday the French lawyer Elise Taullet, displaced to Western Sahara in coordination with the League for the Protection of Saharawi Prisoners in Moroccan Prisons (LPPS).

The LPPS itself has explained that Taullet arrived from France on April 24 and submitted several requests to visit his clients, Saharawi political prisoners from the Gdeim Izik group, to find out what conditions they are in Moroccan prisons.

However, the Moroccan authorities have rejected his accreditation, which delayed the authorization of the process by the Moroccan Ministry of Justice, the Penitentiary Administration and the Prosecutor’s Office.

“All have refused to authorize the aforementioned lawyer to visit their clients. These detainees have been denied access to any lawyer since the end of the trial in 2017,” the LPPS highlighted.

The main objective of this visit was to denounce the isolation and ill-treatment and other forms of psychological torture denounced by the prisoners and which have worsened since September 2017, when these prisoners were dispersed throughout various Moroccan prisons, far from their families.

Following the lack of response from the Moroccan administration, Taullet finally decided to visit the families of the detainees in the city of El Aaiún. He also stopped in the city of Tan-Tan to visit the recently released Saharawi political prisoner, Yahya Mohamed el Hafed Iazza, and the family of the prisoner El Husein Bachir Amaadur.

Taullet was then arrested by the Royal Gendarmerie together with the vice president of the LPPS, Hassanna Duihi, and a member of its board of directors, Hassanna Abba, at the gendarmerie checkpoint in Oued Elwaer, about 100 kilometers north of the city. Tan-Tan city. Taullet was forced to get into a taxi in the direction of the Moroccan city of Agadir.

The LPPS thus denounces the “illegal expulsion” of the French lawyer and demands “the Moroccan occupation State to respect its international obligations to protect civilian prisoners, in particular those stipulated in the provisions of international humanitarian law.”

In addition, the LPPS calls on all international organizations and agencies to pressure Morocco to release all Saharawi civilian prisoners locked up in Moroccan jails without restrictions or conditions.

The imprisoned activists were detained during the dismantling of the Gdeim Izik protest camp, on the outskirts of El Ayoun, on November 8, 2010. There were some 6,500 tents erected a month earlier by Sahrawis to protest their ill-fated actions. social and economic conditions.

The resulting violent clashes in the camp and in El Ayoun resulted in the deaths of 11 security force officers, according to the Moroccan authorities, as well as three civilians.

The former Spanish colony of Western Sahara was occupied by Morocco in 1975 despite resistance from the Polisario Front, with whom it remained at war until 1991, when both parties signed a ceasefire with a view to holding a self-determination referendum, but the differences on the elaboration of the census and the inclusion or not of the Moroccan settlers have prevented its call up to now.