Twelve years ago, the Gdeim Izik camp, established a month earlier near Laayoune, by Sahrawi independence demonstrators, was dismantled by the Moroccan authorities. Hundreds of people were arrested. Twenty-five Sahrawi activists were sentenced in 2013, 19 of whom are still in prison. This month, a coalition of organizations and lawyers are filing six new torture complaints against Morocco with the UN Committee against Torture, on behalf of six of these prisoners.
These six prisoners are Mohamed el Bachir Boutanguiza, Abdellahi Lkhfaouni, Sidi Ahmed Lemjiyed, Ahmed Sbai, Abdullahi Toubali and Houssein Zaoui. The coalition calls for an investigation into the abuse suffered during the arrest and detention of these detainees.
Justine Lavarde, from the FIDH office for the protection of human rights defenders, is part of this coalition. She is at the microphone Magali Lagrange of the Africa editorial staff. ” Complaints are filed for acts of torture that have taken place since the arrests, so for twelve years now, which are therefore acts of physical torture, the most terrible things you can imagine, beatings, threats. We have received some testimonies of prisoners who were stripped naked when they arrived at the police station and who were hung up for hours, who were beaten.
► Read also : “We are still in the context of arbitrary detention” in the Gdim Izik file
So many acts of physical torture, but also psychological torture, with solitary confinement: there is, for example, one of the detainees we are talking about who has been in solitary confinement for five years, which is enormous. They were all transferred away from their families, they are systematically denied access to care, so these are long-term tortures, both physical and psychological, which also continue today, in any case the psychological violence n have not ceased to this day. »
The UN committee has already singled out Morocco several times on this issue. Four people, some of whom have been detained since 2010, seized the United Nations Committee against Torture in Geneva in June 2022. Among them, one of the convicts from the Gdeim Izik camp.
The 24 Sahrawis charged with the murder of members of the security forces during the dismantling of the Gdim Izik camp in November 2010 have were sentenced in February 2013 to penalties of up to life imprisonment. A political trial, denounced human rights organizations.