Skip to main content

Call for "urgent action" to protect Sultana Khaya and her family

Submitted on

Shahid El Hafed (refugee camps), 6 December 2021 (SPS) - The Sahrawi National Committee for Human Rights condemned the attack against the activist Sultana Khaya and her family perpetrated by the Moroccan occupation forces, calling for an "urgent action" to put an end to "terrorism of the Moroccan State".
In a statement, the Committee called on the Security Council, the Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the African Union (AU) and its related mechanisms, to take "urgent action and intervention to put an end to the terrorism of the Moroccan occupation state and take urgent measures to save the life of Sid Brahim Khaya's family".
The Saharawi Human Rights Committee has once again launched an urgent appeal to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, to assume his responsibilities regarding the situation in Western Sahara in the wake of his two-week international campaign to combat violence against women, asking: "Where is this campaign from what is happening to a family of Saharawi women who are suffering of it severely?"
The Sahrawi organisation also called on the International Committee of the Red Cross, within the framework of its competence under the relevant Geneva Conventions, to "define the responsibilities for the crimes committed (in occupied Western Sahara) and to dispatch an independent medical committee to provide the physical and psychological care required by the state of health of Sultana Sid Brahim and members of his family as a result of the repressive actions of which they have been victims since November 19, 2021, and to bring the perpetrators to international justice.
In the same statement, the Saharawi committee noted the heinous crime against the Sid Brahim Khaya family, besieged since November 19, 2020 in Boujdour, an occupied Saharawi city. At dawn on 5 December 2021, a brutal attack was launched against the family home, resorting to all forms of abuse and practices degrading human dignity (rape, beatings, torture and administration by injection of an unknown substance, with the aim of finishing the activist).
062/T