SAHARA PRESS SERVICE

Geneva, 03/04/2004 (SPS) The International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples (LIDLIP) exhorted the Commission for Human Rights, which is holding its 60th session from March the 15th to the next 23rd April, to put pressures on Morocco to «implement the peace plan and so as the question of Saharawi people's self-determination be settled at last ».

«Worried about the detainees' situation in Morocco», the LIDLIP stressed that «some detainees were subjected to torture in barbarous ways that led to some deaths» and, according to it, «some prisoners died as a consequence to ill-treatment ».
 
Evoking the conditions of detentions in Moroccan prisons, the organisation underlined that they were «catastrophic» (...) «The places of detention are overpopulated and the rate of deaths is very high» (...) «the food and hygienic conditions are unsanitary that they cause the emergence of many diseases».

In Moroccan prisons, added the LIDLIP «more than 12 Saharawi political prisoners are imprisoned with criminal prisoners and the majority of them are in El Aaiun prison, where «more than 700 detainees, (are gathered) while the prison can only bare 250 persons».
 
The organisation also showed to be «preoccupied about the 108 non-settled cases of disappearance», of which the majority are Saharawis.

These persons «are likely imprisoned in secret detention centres, and in secret residences in the suburbs of Rabat. The authorities refuse to inform the families about the fate of the disappeared, and in some cases families were intimidated so as to keep silent », added LIDLIP.
 
Moreover, it denounced «the numerous intimidations and insults» addressed to human rights activists, indicating that the Moroccan Government «forbids the participation of representatives of Saharawi people to international conferences» as it was the case of a delegation composed of former disappeared and relatives of disappeared who were deprived from travelling to Geneva last year, to testify in front of the UN's Commission, while their passports were confiscated at the same time.

«This intolerable situation was reproduced again this year, their passports having not been giving back to them yet», deplored the organisation.
 
The LIDLIP expressed its indignation in front of the illegal colonisation of the Saharawi territory, denouncing the wall of shame which continues to separate Saharawi families since decades.

«Western Sahara's territory, the latest colony in Africa, is still occupied by Morocco. The latter had built a real separation wall likely inspired from Israel», the organisation underlined, denouncing Morocco in its attempts to «ovoid HCR's plan to distribute mails between families» and to «reject giving a response to the question of the campaigns of information and mobilisation that Saharawi should lead within the framework of families exchanges ». (SPS)

010/090/667/TRD 031155 Apr 04 SPS

SPS
UN/ OCCUPIED TERRITORIES/MOROCCO/TORTURE
The Special Rapporteur of the UN « preoccupied» about human rights' violations in Western Sahara and in Morocco

Geneva, 03/04/2004 (SPS) The Special Rapporteur of the UN, Theo van Boven, declared himself to be «preoccupied» about human rights violations committed by Moroccan authorities in Western Sahara and in Morocco, calling Rabat to put an end to its repressive acts.

Intervening in front of the 60th session of the UN's Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, concerning civic and political rights, especially, the question of torture and detention, the Special Rapporteur put forward cases of exactions committed against Saharawis: Salek Bazeid, Ahmed Nassiri, Mohamed Lamin Ali Lahbib Bourhil and the Spaniard, Juan Antonio Solana Marcos.
   
According to him, Salek Bazeid was arrested, in September the 24th 2002, in his home in Western Sahara by seven civil policemen, who «had beaten him in front of his mother, the latter having also been beaten».

Roughly treated with his sister in their house, M. Bazeid was «maltreated» in the police station of El Aaiun before been deported to the headquarter of the mobile company of intervention (PC-CMI), « where he will stay for 24 hours without drinking or eating. He would have lost consciousness and carried to hospital where a doctor would have refused to let him in».

The report cited the case of Ahmed Nassiri, Activist of Sahara's Section of the Forum Truth and Justice, and who was arrested in June 2002 in Rabat while he was in the police station to renew his identity card.

Mr. Nassiri was removed to Casablanca then to El Aaiun in the criminal police's headquarter, where he would be submitted to the method of torture called «airplane», by which the victim is hands and legs attached to a hanging stick while a heavy thing or person is put on the victim's back to push the articulations of the shoulders and hips to the extremity of the possible.

The report also evoked the case of Mohamed Lamin Ali Lahbib Bourhil, arrested in the 24th September 2002 and token to El Aaiun's police station. «Blindfolded, hands attached and a rag soaked with urine would have been put on his nose and in his mouth. His parents were unable to neither pay him visit to the
police station nor bring him food», underlined the report.

Moreover, the Special Rapporteur denounced «the considerable extension of the delay of elementary detention, the period where risks of torture is the most important, either in the general criminal law or in the antiterrorist laws, which follows under examination in the second periodical report»

He also notes the absence, during the elementary detention period, of «guaranties that assure a quick and appropriate access to a lawyer and a doctor, as well as to the members of the family of the detained persons, and the absence of a criminal law disposition that forbid the use of any information extracted under torture as an element of evidence in proceedings ». (SPS)

010/090/667/TRD 031118 Apr 04 SPS