RFK CENTER REAFFIRMS GREAT VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The Women from the Africa´s last colony, Western Sahara, express their satistaction for the recent report of the prestigous R.F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights where the american institution reaffirmed that in the occupied cities of Western sahara the moroccan authorities still comiting human rights abuses persist in wake of November unrest.

Based on dozens of interviews, this report documents human rights abuses inflicted by Moroccan government forces against civilians during the dismantlement of the Gdaim Izik protest camp in November 2010, and in its aftermath.

In January 2011, a delegation of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights traveled to Western Sahara to visit 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Laureate, Aminatou Haidar. Led by Haidar, the delegation examined human rights violations allegedly committed by Moroccan security forces against Sahrawis. The delegation met with more than two dozen victims of abuse, torture, and imprisonment and their families, in addition to Moroccan government officials and representatives of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO).

According to the findings of the report, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, failure to follow criminal procedures, and repression of civilians by Moroccan government forces are all too common in Western Sahara. This context, in concert with the violence that broke out on November 8, 2010, when Moroccan security forces dismantled the Gdaim Izik camp set up by residents of Western Sahara to protest social and economic discrimination, reinforces the need for impartial international human rights monitoring of the situation.

EOROPEAN TRADE UNIONS CONDEMS GREAT VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The Women from Western sahara express their total support to the report released these days of a mission of the European most representative trade unions where they have denounced the holding in the Moroccan prisons of hundreds of Saharawis have been arrested by the Moroccan occupying forces last November in Western Sahara.

Eight unions from different European countries, including Italy, who had stay in the capital city of Western Sahara, ilegally occupied by moroccan army, El-Aaiún, from 23 to 25 January, have published their report in which they denounce great abuses of human rights against the peaceful Saharawi population.

"The objectives of the mission were to show the international solidarity to Western Sahara workers and to the Sahrawi people, and be directly in touch with the current situation of the Sahrawi occupied territories by Morocco," the trade union´s report affirms in its joint communiqyé that have been published on monday, january 30th, in the italian capital, Rome.

Saharawi Women launch an urgent appeal to the international community and the European Union to put pressure on the moroccan government to respect the human rights in the occupied Western Sahara and the United Nations´s resolutions on this problem of decolonization.