Shaheed El-Hafed, 10 December 2025 (SPS) – The Sahrawi National Committee for Human Rights (SNCHR) has called on international organizations and specialized human rights bodies to work towards investigating the torture and killings committed by the Moroccan occupying state against unarmed Sahrawis in the occupied cities of Western Sahara.
In a statement issued on the occasion of International Human Rights Day, a copy of which was received by SPS, the Committee urged—with strong insistence—global human rights organizations, all specialized committees and mechanisms, and the UN working groups related to human rights to act to investigate torture, killings, and other crimes perpetrated by the Moroccan state against unarmed Sahrawi civilians in the occupied territories of Western Sahara.
The statement appealed to international human rights and humanitarian organizations and associations to pressure Morocco to respect human rights, to immediately and unconditionally release all Sahrawi defenders, activists, and political prisoners, to annul the arbitrary and unjust sentences issued against them, and to reveal the fate of more than 400 missing Sahrawis. It also called for opening the occupied territories of the Sahrawi Republic to the media, international observers, and international parliamentary delegations.
The statement condemned the failure of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to protect Sahrawi citizens, their land, and their property in line with its mandate under the Fourth Geneva Convention concerning the protection of civilians in wartime. It called on the ICRC to end its troubling silence whenever violations of human and peoples’ rights occur in occupied Western Sahara, considering its claim that it cannot verify facts due to Morocco’s ban on visiting the occupied territory as a clear act of complicity and a flimsy excuse to evade its responsibilities.
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