Transitional Justice Forum

Morocco's IER report

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:12 | TrackBack

Oops! I was working on this post at almost the exact same time Christopher was working on the next one-- on the same subject. Actually, they complement each other to some degree, so can helpfully both be read together. I shall put updated links to IER source docs into comments here, when I have time to find them. (Or, any reader here could do that.) Btw, nice job, Christopher!

In Morocco, the Justice and Reconciliation Authority (Instance Equité et Réconciliation-- IER) has now started to release its final report. The IER has quite a well developed website, with good offerings in Arabic, French, and Spanish. As far as I can see, the material published there in each of French and Arabic is around the same. (The Spanish area is less up-to-date.) At the end of this post, I have used the French-language portal and the links that it already provides to excerpts from the report relating to "Reparations" and "Recommendations" They are promising to post the section on "Establishment of the truth and determination of responsibilities", but that page is so far empty of text in both French and Arabic. The site is also advertising that it will "shortly" provide the whole text of the report online...

For now, English-language-only readers can learn most about the report from the BBC and Al-Jazeera (English) websites.

This Dec. 16 piece on the BBC site gives us some helpful raw statistics about the IER's work:

Morocco's truth commission - the first in the Arab world - has delivered its final report on four decades of human rights abuses under King Hassan II.

Between independence in 1956 and the end of Hassan's reign in 1999, 592 people were killed, the Equity and Reconciliation Committee (IER) said.

The king, father of current King Mohammed VI, was criticised for suppressing opposition activists.

The report is the result of a two-year investigation.

Thousands of victims and their families were allowed to speak openly to the commission about the abuses.

The 17-member commission, set up in January 2004, heard from 16,861 people, and assessed whether victims should be given compensation and how much they should receive.

A summary of the IER report said that it had recommended 9,280 victims were entitled to payments.

The commission found that 322 people had been shot dead by government troops in protests, and that 174 people had died in arbitrary detention.

The graves of 85 people, who had been detained in secret prisons, were also identified.

The head of the IER, Driss Benzekri, said last month that he thought the report would be significant.

"We hope to see our conclusions and results contribute meaningfully to both the history of our country and to paving the way for building a state of justice," he said.

That report also cited criticisms of the IER's work voiced by the Moroccan Association for Human Rights. These criticisms focused on two factors: (1) the fact that the IER was mandated not to name the names of the perpetrators of the atrocities it described, and (2) the claim that the IER had significantly under-counted the numbers of victims.

Today, the BBC site has a follow-up piece, which focuses more heavily on the criticisms. It quotes a rights association official named Abdullah Abdeslam as saying that in just two anti-government protests in the period covered by the IER study-- in 1965 and 1981-- 1,500 and "between 500 and 1,000" people were killed, respectively.

Today's Al-Jazeera report, available here, provides a fuller account of the IER's work than is available on the BBC site. It was written by Ahmad Amrawi. In addition, that Jazeera story links to this April 2005 story, also by Amrawi, which gives a lot more useful background on the IER's work.

Moving along to the IER's recommendations, here is a quickie Babelfish translation into English of the IER site's French-language version of these (edited incompletely and imperfectly by myself):

In order to guarantee the non-repetition of the serious violations of human rights and to consolidate the process of reforms in the country in which it is registered, the IER has put out a series of recommendations relating in particular to constitutional reforms, the implementation of a national strategy to fight against ̱impunity, and the follow-up of recommendations.

I- The consolidation of the constitutional guarantees of human rights, in particular by institutionalizing the principles of the primacy of international human rights law overf national law, of the presumption of innocence and the right to due process... The IER in addition recommends the reinforcement of the principle of the separation of powers, and constitutional banning of any interference of the executive power in the ḻorganisation and operation of the judicial power.

It recommends spelling out in the constitutional text, the content of freedoms and basic rights, relating to freedoms of circulation, expression, of demonstration, ̱association, of going on strike... as well as principles such as the secrecy of correspondence, ̱inviolability of the home and the respect of the private life.

The IER recommends moreover to reinforce the control of the constitutionality of the laws and the autonomous rulings coming out from the Executive, by envisaging in the constitution the justiciable right d’un to prevail itself d’une exception ḏinconstitutionnality d’une law or d’un autonomous payment. [This not clear to me, in French.]

With start of already old constitutional ban on a signle-party system, the IER recommends finally the prohibition of forced disappearance, arbitrary detention, genocide and other crimes against ̱humanity, torture and all treatments or cruel, inhumane or degrading punishments, and a ban on all the internationally prohibited forms of discrimination, like any form of ̱incitement to racism, xenophobia, violence and hatred.

II- Adoption and implementation of an integrated national strategy to fight against ̱impunity. ...

III- The IER considers that the consolidation of the rule of law requires in addition reforms in the fields of justice, the legislation and penal policy. Thus, it recommends in particular :


** Governance of the security apparatus...

** Reinforcement of the independence of the judiciary ...

** Levelling the penal legislation and policy ...


IV- Follow-up mechanisms...

I guess that in the broad view, thislist of recommendations is certainly not everything that a "strict-accountability" rights activist would seek to get. After all, there is no recommendation whatsoever for prosecutions of past rights abusers. But it does look as though the IER was very focused on trying to put good, solid rule-of-law safeguards into place going forward in Morocco.

Is that the best that the Moroccan people can hope for? Well, it's already a very significant change from the near-complete absence of any rule of law protections in the situation that existed prior to 1999, the year that the present King, Mohamed VI, took over from his father, Hassan II. And I find it interesting that in a regime that experienced a "transition" only in generational terms, at the very top, we have already seen such a far-reaching political transition being enacted by the new monarch, even if still in a very top-down manner. But good for the King. May he take this process a whole lot further.

I imagine, though, that he feels he still needs the support of most of his father's top generals as he does so? If he can persuade them to sign on to a new system enshrining much, much greater rule-of-law protections, then that's great. (The new regimes in South Africa, post-1994 and in Spain, post-1975, showed they were able to achieve that. Why not King Muhamed VI?)