WESTERN SAHARA: THE FACTS

The Canary Islands, Galician and Andalusian fishing fleets have had to leave the Western Sahara fishing bank and the internationally recognized coastal waters of Morocco, when the fishing agreement established between the EU and Rabat expired.

It is unfortunate that Spanish fishermen cannot fish. But international law had to be applied, in this case, since before the European Parliament determined that Morocco lacks rights over the waters of the former Spanish colony.

Since December 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union has unequivocally concluded: Bilateral agreements between the EU and Morocco, including the fisheries agreement, cannot be applied to Western Sahara.

This conclusion is in accordance with the advisory notice of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, issued on October 16, 1975, and the relevant resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council of the UN, as well as the position of the Organization of the African Unity (today called the African Union)

In 1975, Spain did not own Western Sahara. The colony was a non-autonomous territory and Spain was the administrator. When the tripartite agreement is signed, Spain does not cede sovereignty of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania (it did not possess it), what it cedes is the administration.

Rabat and Nouakchott must administer their part of the territory pending a consultation with the Saharawi people. For this reason, the Security Council created MINURSO (which still exists) to organize a referendum on self-determination.

MINURSO resorts to the electoral census made by Spain during the colony, because it is the most reliable of all. Name all the Saharawi tribes and their descendants. It was, without the slightest possible doubt, the appropriate census.

Morocco realizes that with this census it has lost the Sahara. So he manipulates to include thousands of settlers he has relocated to Western Sahara to be allowed to vote. Naturally, this invasion of settlers is illegal, because not one of them can present a testimony of a direct relationship with a Saharawi tribe.

Morocco blocks the census and the UN cannot force the referendum. Morocco violates international law, and violates it even more when Mauritania and the Polisario negotiated in August 1979 the withdrawal of the southern part administered by Nouakchott (river of gold) that was to be transferred to the Polisario*

 Morocco illegally enters the Mauritanian part and occupies the entire Western Sahara, rejecting that Mauritania has reaffirmed that the only representative of the Saharawi people is the Polisario and it is up to him to cede his part.

In 2018, the General Counsel of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Melchior Wathelet, reported that the Fisheries Agreement between the EU and Morocco is NOT valid as it applies to Western Sahara and adjacent waters.

“Western Sahara is a territory in northwest Africa that borders Morocco to the north, Algeria to the northeast, Mauritania to the east and south, and the Atlantic to the west,” says the jurist.

Through the ruling, the Court of Justice, before which a dispute between the Polisario Front and the Council of the European Union and the European Commission was being appealed, declared that it should be interpreted, in accordance with International Law, that the Agreement of Association and the Liberalization Agreement concluded between the EU and Morocco were not applicable to the territory of the Sahara

The European Commission, inspired by Spain, has filed an appeal against the decision of the CJEU, and we will have to wait, probably at the end of the year, to obtain a response to the appeal from Brussels. Meanwhile, aid is provided for shipowners who have their fleets unable to fish in their usual fishing grounds in the Sahara and Morocco.

(*) I witnessed the agreement in Algiers.