Rabat, Morocco (TMT)- The world’s most notorious human rights organization Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Morocco witnessed a backdrop in “tolerance for dissident voices,” quoting from Human Rights Watch’s 2016 World Report.
Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa director said that “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.”
Despite the backdrop of human rights, the leading organization said that there were some positive steps that were noticed,” including legal recognition, for the first time, of a Sahrawi human rights organization highly critical of Moroccan rule and provisional legal residency for foreigners that UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, had determined to be refugees. A new law took effect ending military trials for civilians, although it did not benefit prisoners already convicted by military tribunals.”
When it came to enlisting the abuses, Human Right Watch said that “defendants before civilian courts had no guarantees of a fair trial, however. 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. People went to prison under laws criminalizing homosexuality and adultery.”
“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,” Human Rights Watch said.
The authorities systematically prohibited demonstrations by pro-independence activists in the Sahara, while “Royal pardons during the year included none of the many activists sentenced in past years in unfair trials,” the Human rights body stressed.
The Moroccan Times.
