Washington, April 15, 2014 (SPS) - Human Rights Watch has urged the Security Council of the United Nations to extend the mandate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) to incorporate human rights monitoring, welcoming the call made by Ban Ki-moon in his report on the situation in Western Sahara released April 10, 2014 for “sustained, independent and impartial monitoring of human rights.
In a letter addressed Members of the UN Security Council, HRW reminded that the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) is almost alone among modern peacekeeping missions, lacks a mandate to monitor and report on human rights violations.
The letter welcomed the call made by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his report on the situation in Western Sahara released April 10, 2014, for a “sustained, independent and impartial monitoring of human rights» of the Saharawi people.
The ONG underlined, in this respect, that the existing rights-monitoring mechanisms fail to meet these criteria, which would be best satisfied by enlarging the mandate of MINURSO to include human rights monitoring.
HRW went on saying that the situation in Western Sahara is characterized by Morocco’s firm repression of all Sahrawis who express their opposition to Moroccan rule and who favor self-determination, adding that Moroccan authorities continue to prevent the Saharawis from holding public demonstrations or creating legally recognized associations, provide no remedies to credible complaints of police violence against them, and prosecute and imprison Sahrawi activists after unfair trials in which complaints of torture go uninvestigated.
It also indicated that in recent years, human rights monitoring, investigating, and reporting have become an integral part of UN peacekeeping operations around the world, whereas it is still absent in the MINURSO job. (SPS)
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