Rabat, December 23, 2014 – Moroccan authorities should release a Sahrawi activist who has been held awaiting trial for more than 15 months, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement on Monday.
“If Morocco has evidence of criminal wrongdoing against Mbarek Daoudi, the authorities should try him fairly and without further delay before a civilian court,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “In the meantime, they should release Daoudi.”
Daoudi’s son Omar told Human Rights Watch that his father is subsisting on sugar and tea and that his health has deteriorated considerably. He shares a group cell with common criminal prisoners.
The 58-year-old Sahrawi activist has been on a hunger strike since early November to protest his detention conditions and the delay in starting his trial. After his arrest in late September 2013, he told his lawyers that police had beaten and insulted him, and forced him to sign a “confession,” said HRW in its statement.
Morocco’s courts have demonstrated a pattern of convicting Western Sahara activists on criminal charges in unfair trials. The trials have been tainted, notably by the courts’ failure to investigate defendant claims that their confessions had been made under police torture or ill-treatment or had been falsified, or that the police had coerced them to sign the statements without reading them, HRW added.
A military court convicted 25 other Sahrawi civilians, including several who are human rights activists, in an unfair group trial in February 2013 for their alleged role in violence surrounding the dismantling by security forces of a Sahrawi protest tent encampment in Gdeim Izik, Western Sahara, in November 2010. Twenty-two of the defendants are serving sentences of between 20 years and life in prison, HRW recalled. (SPS)
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