Geneva (UN Human Rights Council) 9 September 2026 (SPS) – South Africa called for stronger international action to protect human rights in occupied Western Sahara, end impunity for violations against Sahrawi human rights defenders and ensure respect for the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination.
The call was made by South African Ambassador Zaheer Laher, on Wednesday during a side event held on the margins of the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, focusing on arbitrary detention, fair-trial guarantees and the protection of human rights defenders in occupied Western Sahara.
Speaking on behalf of South Africa, which co-sponsored the event, Ambassador Laher expressed serious concern over continuing reports of arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment and denial of fair-trial guarantees affecting Sahrawi human rights defenders, including students and youth activists, as well as journalists and lawyers.
He stressed that these violations cannot be addressed in isolation from the reality of occupation, particularly in the absence of effective human rights scrutiny and accountability, and urged the international community to ensure that the rights of the Sahrawi people are protected and that they are able to freely determine their political future.
Ambassador Laher reaffirmed South Africa’s solidarity with the Sahrawi people in their “legitimate legal struggle for self-determination and the full enjoyment of their human rights,” while paying tribute to recently released members of the Sahrawi Student Group Elkantawi Elbeur, Aziz El Ouahidi, Abdelmoula El Hafidi and Mohammed Dadda, who spent ten years in detention.
Drawing parallels with South Africa’s own history, the ambassador recalled the country’s apartheid past, when authorities used similar instruments to criminalise those who claimed their fundamental rights and freedoms. He noted that many South African human rights defenders were students who played a leading role in the struggle for freedom.
He particularly recalled the Soweto students who took to the streets on June 16, 1976, to peacefully protest against apartheid education and were met with bullets. Their struggle, he said, was not in vain, as it gave rise to decades of protest in South Africa and around the world that ultimately brought the apartheid government to an end.
On the 50th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, Ambassador Laher stressed that South Africans are therefore “duty-bound” to ensure that the abuses experienced by those students and subsequent generations are not inflicted on others.
Against this backdrop, he expressed South Africa’s serious concern over continuing reports of arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment and denial of fair-trial guarantees affecting Sahrawi human rights defenders, including students and youth activists, as well as journalists and lawyers.
He noted that such reports have been consistently confirmed by, among others, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Committee against Torture, and have also been echoed by several Special Procedure mandate holders. Despite these findings, he stressed, accountability has remained elusive.
Ambassador Laher further criticised the failure of the Human Rights Council to act, stressing that the Council is entrusted with promoting human rights globally and not selectively. Failure to act, he warned, allows impunity and a lack of accountability to persist.
He urged the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to pursue all available avenues to secure access to Western Sahara and ensure that the human rights situation there is documented, reported and acted upon with the same rigour and urgency applied to other situations on the Council’s agenda.
The South African ambassador stressed that the High Commissioner’s mandate contains no geographic exception and does not stop at the borders of politically inconvenient territories. He further noted that nothing prevents the High Commissioner from producing a report on Western Sahara, as has been done in other situations where access has been denied.
Ambassador Laher also highlighted what he described as the unique absence of a human rights mandate within the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). He pointed out that UN peacekeeping and political missions deployed in situations of conflict or occupation routinely incorporate human rights components, describing this as standard practice, particularly on the African continent.
“MINURSO is the exception,” he stressed, arguing that political pressure and double standards have preserved this situation and created the impression that normal rules do not apply to Western Sahara or that the human rights of some people are considered more important than those of others.
He added that the double standards evident at the UN Security Council are also evident at the Human Rights Council.
The South African diplomat stressed that the absence of scrutiny cannot be considered accidental and that issues such as arbitrary detention and denial of fair-trial guarantees cannot be addressed in isolation. Rather, he said, they are symptoms of an occupation that denies a people the right to determine their own political future.
“So long as that denial continues,” he warned, arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, politically motivated prosecutions, suppression of peaceful assembly, and harassment and surveillance of Sahrawi human rights defenders, including student defenders, will persist.
He recalled that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had already recognised this link in 2006, when it expressed serious concern about the human rights situation in Western Sahara and linked the violations directly to the denial of the right to self-determination.
Ambassador Laher stressed that the right to self-determination cannot be substituted, reinterpreted or limited through arrangements imposed without the freely expressed consent of the people concerned. He described the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination as an inalienable right enshrined in the UN Charter and international law, reflected in the International Covenants on Human Rights and reaffirmed through numerous UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions.
He also recalled that the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights have addressed the right to self-determination.
Concluding his remarks, the South African ambassador warned that, at a time when multilateralism, international law and human rights are under sustained attack, the international community cannot afford a situation in which the law serves only the interests of the powerful or the few.
He stressed that until a decisive end is brought to the ongoing unlawful occupation of Western Sahara, which remains a decolonisation issue on the UN agenda, “the Sahrawi people will not be free.”
He therefore called for collective action to ensure that the Sahrawi people can finally choose their own destiny through a referendum that provides for the genuine expression of their right to self-determination. (SPS)
090/500/60 (SPS)
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