DIDH Totally Rejects Content of Publication Released by Amnesty International’s Spanish Section

The Interministerial Delegation for Human Rights (DIDH) has totally rejected on Monday the latest publication released on February 20 by the Spanish section of Amnesty International. In a statement entitled “Finally, the mask has fallen on Amnesty”, the Delegation notes that “the form of this latest publication is not specified by the NGO to know if it is a press release or a report as is customary, deliberately favoring a political discourse based on incitement in support of which it continues its hostile campaigns against Morocco,” adding that Amnesty has chosen this time to escalate on the substance and form. In view of this deliberate turnaround in its editorial line in contradiction with its literature and its claims for decades in the field of human rights protection, the DIDH is fully entitled to raise objections, firstly that “the said publication has been elaborated in a deliberately ambiguous style that lends itself to confusion, whereas common sense presupposes that this NGO expresses its positions directly and not to rehash through its Spanish section old allegations.” Consequently, the DIDH considers that “the recourse of Amnesty International to its section in Spain is an admission of failure to respond to the multiple clarifications presented by the Moroccan public authorities regarding the human rights situation. Moreover, the approach of its section, which has no capacity whatsoever, nor prerogative, places the parent organization in a position of political cowardice, having chosen incitement instead of the human rights approach of which it has long prided itself.”  The second objection formulated by the DIDH concerns the fact that “this publication knowingly persists in approaching the ten cases it cites in a malicious manner, associating a politicization of its position in favor of the enemies of the Kingdom’s territorial integrity and unfounded allegations and judged as such by the justice system and of which a large majority has been the subject of a follow-up by the National Council for Human Rights (CNDH).” “This represents a blatant bias in favor of one party in the regional conflict facing our country in defense of its territorial integrity, a conflict whose resolution is entrusted to the United Nations Security Council on the basis of an autonomy plan deemed realistic, serious and credible and enjoying a wide and considerable recognition without precedent,” the DIDH stresses before asking what argument and what statement of international law and other modes of management of disputes submitted to the UN that Amnesty International relies on to arrogate to itself the right to give its political opinion on a conflict of this nature, knowing that the said organization has not ceased to affirm for many years that its activity is confined exclusively to the field of human rights. Consequently, the allegations of human rights violations are not credible, as they are based on unfounded statements due to bias, according to the same source. The DIDH’s third objection concerns the fact that the publication “persists in a strange way in not giving any proof to its allegations of human rights violations. The NGO did not collect data in situ, nor did it follow the trials directly or through any other intermediary in order to be able to suggest remarks, nor did it carry out an analytical reading of the verdicts concerning eight of the ten persons mentioned in its publication,” having chosen a political approach based on incitement, just as in the case of its allegations concerning the conditions of incarceration of the detained persons, while the institutions concerned periodically publish information about them. The fourth objection formulated by the Delegation notes that “Amnesty continues always and in an undignified way to evoke torture, being thus indifferent to the progress made by Morocco through the international reactivity towards the mechanisms and also at the level of the action of the national mechanism for torture prevention as well as the reports of the human rights organizations. And so, the truth is lost both in terms of method and evaluation because of Amnesty’s political short-sightedness and also because of its bad faith, its publication not having taken into account the clarifications and data presented by Morocco on the occasion of the international response to the specialized UN mechanisms and which are published and accessible to the general public. In its fifth objection, the DIDH points out that Amnesty International maintains the confusion and the amalgam by evoking ill-intentioned imaginary sexual assaults, and the only case it evokes represents in itself the height of incitement to political ends. The Delegation’s sixth objection concerns the fact that “Amnesty International persists in evoking the chimera ‘Pegasus’ while the Moroccan public authorities delivered a clear and unambiguous answer, in addition to very recently an international expertise presented publicly by the National Commission for the control of the personal data protection (CNDP) which denied Amnesty’s allegations on this subject As for the DIDH’s seventh objection, it points to the political approach based on incitement now adopted by Amnesty instead of its field of action to refer to the State’s policy in the field of human rights. The Delegation indicated that in this case it can only remind it of what is currently taking place before the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) on the occasion of the adoption of the fourth national report on the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), in which the Kingdom of Morocco publicly presents its policy in favor of the respect of its commitments, being a constant and growing strategic choice in a regional environment plagued by terrorism and armed conflicts The DIDH’s eighth and last objection concerns the observation that “Amnesty persists in its cabal against Morocco by insidiously evoking the question of freedom of opinion and of the press in relation to cases judged or being judged before the courts. On this register, the Delegation would like to specify once again that ”these are people prosecuted in the context of cases under common law and that freedom of expression is and remains a concern of all the nations’ active forces, being at the heart of reform initiatives and respect for human rights based on respect for religion, the monarchy, territorial integrity and democratic choices, all of which are the foundations of the Moroccan state about which Amnesty seeks to meddle.”