Paris (France) Feb20,2013(SPS) - French non-governmental organizations (NGOs) condemned Monday the verdict pronounced by the military court of Rabat against 24 Sahrawi political prisoners from Gdeim Izik group, dubbing it "shameful" and "iniquitous."
The Association of Friends of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (AARASD) denounced a "large-scale political operation" which, according to it, "associated the royal power and the militants for the scheming, in the trial that started on February 1, after two postponements in 2012.
"While Morocco, a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, shows great ambitions at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, it has taken the risk of such an operation to make Moroccans, Sahrawi people and the world forget the great protestation of Gdeim Izik, which overwhelmingly rejected the Moroccan occupation in October 2010," the association said in a statement.
For the association, this verdict is a "political score-settling, as the sentences announced are severe and have no relationship with the qualification of the prisoners’ charges."(SPS)
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