Aside from the current FIFA World Cup and the success of the Moroccan team, complaints have been filed against Morocco in UN human rights proceedings. Sahrawi students are still being held as political prisoners.
Morocco have achieved a sensation by reaching the semi-finals of the World Cup. There was great jubilation when the team became the first African team ever to advance this far. The young men of the Moroccan national team deserve credit for this success. Coming from a country where youth unemployment is 27%, they have fulfilled more than one dream with a remarkable professional football career.
On Wednesday, December 14, the spotlight shone worldwide on the historic World Cup semi-final match between Morocco and France. On the same day, with far less attention, a coalition of organizations filed a complaint against Morocco with several special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council.
The lawsuit concerns ten Sahrawi students who have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Moroccan prisons. Back in 2019, the Working Group against Arbitrary Detention concluded that four of the students sentenced in 2016 were being held solely for their political activism and called for their immediate release.
Students network
One of the students is Aziz El Ouahidi. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in July 2016. Aziz El Ouahidi was 23 years old at the time and belonged to the so-called El Wali student group. In 2014, Sahrawi students, who are often discriminated against in Morocco and have to fight for their rights, began to organize themselves more and more. They also made contact with Moroccan student organizations and in some cases campaigned together for their concerns. This also brought many young Moroccans into contact with young Saharawis for the first time and gave them a different narrative of the violent occupation of Western Sahara than the one still spread by Moroccan propaganda today. In addition, the various local Sahrawi student organizations began to network.
Forced confession as evidence
In December 2015, a Sahrawi student was critically injured in Marrakech. The attack with knives and swords, allegedly by Moroccan students, was not investigated by the police. This led to a protest to which students from all over Morocco traveled. After the demonstration ended, a Moroccan student was killed. This event was used as an opportunity to arrest numerous leaders of the Sahrawi student movement in the months that followed. Among them was Aziz El Ouahidi. He went to the police station himself after the police stormed his family home, abused family members and threatened to arrest his younger brother if Aziz El Ouahidi did not turn himself in. He did not know what he was accused of at the time.
Aziz El Ouahidi was convicted of being involved in the death of the Moroccan student, although there is evidence that he was not even in Marrakesh on January 24, 2016, when the Moroccan student died. The piece of evidence that led to his conviction: a confession signed under torture. Despite the 2019 assessment by the UN Working Group against Arbitrary Detention that Aziz El Ouahidi and other members of the student group were wrongly imprisoned, nothing has happened.
Sahrawi students still in custody
This is why a further complaint was submitted this week to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention under the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
While football fans cheered on the Moroccan team and Aziz El Ouahidi and other Saharawis students were imprisoned as political prisoners, 174,000 Sahrawis are still living in the Saharawi refugee camps in the Algerian desert. They fled there in 1975 when Moroccan troops invaded the Western Sahara. The third generation of Sahrawi refugees is now growing up there under the most precarious conditions.
