AFAPREDESA
The Association for the Families of Saharawi Prisoners and the Disappeared
The Spanish Lawyer General Council denounces the maintenance of 14 Saharawi militants in custody
The Spanish Lawyer General Council (CGAE) denounced, on Wednesday, the maintenance of 14 Saharawi human rights activists in custody in Moroccan prisons of Aït Melloul, Inzegan and Tiznit.
Madrid, 11/05/2006 (SPS) CGAE also denounced ''the continuity of aggressions by the Moroccan police against the released prisoners as well as the arbitrary detentions'', the organisation said in a press release.
The Council noted that the Moroccan Government was ''forced'' these last weeks to release 64 Saharawi human rights activists because of ''international pressures'' and of the report of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who expressed the ''preoccupation'' of this international organisation for these "human rights violations in the Western Sahara ".
On another hand, the Spanish organisation noted that the UN announced the dispatch to the occupied territories of the Western Sahara, of a delegation from the UN High Commissioner for Hum Rights to investigate on the situation.
CGAE recalled that its mission of observers, composed of jurists, was the only to have access to the trials of the Saharawi militants.
It remarked that the ''denunciations'', expressed by this mission, about the violations of the legal norms of trials had ''not only enabled the reduction of the sentences but also contributed to the release of a part of the Saharawi detainees''.
The text reported ''the exercise of torture during the detention of the accused, the partiality of the judges, the treatment received by the lawyers (favouring the accusation, to the detriment of the defence), the enforcement of the Moroccan penal law in a Non-Self-Governing territory and the violent interventions of police agents and military forces in court''. (SPS)