Dakhla (Occupied Territories)- Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR)'s oil and mines authority has denounced the signing by Rabat, represented by the Moroccan National Office for Hydrocarbons and Mines, of an agreement with Israeli oil company Ratio Petroleum on the exploration of the Atlantic block of the occupied Sahrawi city of Dakhla.
"The agreement is a new step in the series of economic crimes perpetrated by Morocco in the occupied Saharawi territories," the Saharawi oil and mining authority said in a statement.
The authority recalls the legal status of Western Sahara as a territory pending a decolonization process, as it is illegally occupied by Morocco.
"The agreement has no legal value because Morocco has no sovereignty over Western Sahara, as affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion in 1975, and reiterated by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in 2016 and 2018, and recently by the Court of the European Union on 29 September 2021."
The agreement signed late September is considered to be doubly political, taking place nine months after the signing of the agreement on the normalization of relations between the Zionist entity and Morocco.
The total area of the Atlantic block of Dakhla is more than 129,000 square kilometres.
It is located in the southern part of Western Sahara and extends to the border with Mauritania.
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