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Human Rights Watch denounces decline of tolerance for dissident voices in Morocco, occupied Western Sahara

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Washington(U.S.A) January 28, 2016 (SPS) - The Non-Governmental organization, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday, in its annual report on Human Rights, that the tolerance for dissident voices in Morocco and Western Sahara diminished during 2015.

 

Authorities blocked events organized by the outspoken Moroccan Human Rights Association (AMDH), filed charges against five activists for “harming internal security” after they organized a foreign-funded workshop on citizen journalism, said the NGO, whose headquarters is in Washington.

 

HRW said that Moroccan authorities systematically prohibited demonstrations by pro-independence activists in Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco since 1975, regretting that the Royal pardons during the year included none of the many activists sentenced in past years in unfair trials.

 

“Morocco may not be rocked by turmoil and bloodshed like many countries of the Middle East, but neither is it the model of reform that it claims to be,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

In its 2016 World Report, 659-page Human Rights Watch noted that the Defendants before civilian courts had no guarantees of a fair trial.

The courts convicted people in trials that appeared to be politically motivated on the basis of statements prepared by the police while failing to investigate defendants’ claims that the police had extracted the statements by force or falsified them, she said

 

A new law took effect ending military trials for civilians, although it did not benefit prisoners already convicted by military tribunals.

 

The coming year will also reveal whether Morocco intends to maintain the ban on visits that it imposed on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in 2015, or to resume a policy of general openness toward international human rights organizations, said the Non-Governmental organization. (SPS)

 

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