Socialist barrabasadas of the XIV legislature on human rights

There is only one Member State of the European Union that has expelled a non-violent political dissident sentenced to death in his country of origin: Spain. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, did it on March 24, 2022..

Mohamed Benhalima, a 33-year-old former Algerian police officer, arrived in Spain legally in 2019 and tried twice in vain to obtain asylum. was not granted. From his Spanish exile, he recorded videos on YouTube, where he had up to 155,000 followers, denouncing corruption in his country's army. Algeria did not request his extradition, but Grande-Marlaska handed him over, chartering an Iberia plane almost to himself.. Until then, the Algerians had only been expelled by boat.

The minister thus tried to appease Algerian anger at Pedro Sánchez's alignment with Morocco, embodied, on March 14, 2022, in a letter to King Mohamed VI, supporting his proposal to resolve the Western Sahara conflict by circumventing the self-determination referendum.. It didn't help.

Mohamed Benhalima was waiting in his country for a death sentence pronounced in absentia by the Blida military court, which will probably not be carried out because a moratorium has been in force in Algeria since 1993. He also had a string of trials pending – he counted to 19 – although before he was “physically attacked” by the security forces, according to Amnesty International..

Seven months earlier, in August 2021, Grande-Marlaska already starred in another controversial first expulsion of another Algerian, also a former soldier, Mohamed Abdellah, who was not granted asylum either.. He was the forerunner of Benhalima in his YouTube denunciation of corruption among the Algerian military hierarchy. He lived in the Basque Country with his wife and two young children, who were saved from deportation. In Bilbao or Madrid, his family demonstrates regularly asking for the father to be released.

Both ex-military men were affiliated with Rachad, an opposition movement that the Algerian authorities label as terrorist.. It had non-violent Islamist origins from which it departed to open up to secular dissent. Its address is in London and its managers move around the EU without restrictions. The French police even went as far as advising their leader in France on how to protect herself from the surveillance of the agents in Algiers.. Amnesty International also does not doubt the “democratic commitment” of the two Algerian deportees.

Lawyer Alejandro Gámez and the network of lawyers to which he belongs have brought the case before the United Nations Committee against Torture to rule on whether, in the case of Benhalima, fundamental rights were violated, because no one can be expelled who run the risk of being tortured. Even the UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned that this danger existed, but Grande-Marlaska ignored it.. When the committee makes its decision, in a few months, he will have long since ceased to be a minister.

Grande-Marlaska debuted with the controversial expulsions three months after taking office. He deported to Egypt the imam of Logroño, the Egyptian Alaa Mohamed Said, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist movement, but not violent. He ignored the concern expressed by the European Court of Human Rights about the risk of the cleric suffering “inhuman treatment” upon arrival.. So it was. If he really posed a danger to national security, as the Police alleged in a muddled report on Islamic currents, the Interior could have sent the imam to Qatar, the refuge country of the Muslim Brotherhood..

The bullshit in the field of human rights obviously has a Moroccan side. Grande-Marlaka answered, in January 2019, a request for the surrender of the Saharawi activist Hussein Bachir Brahim, who had just disembarked from a small boat in Lanzarote. He was not even given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Upon his return, he was sentenced to 12 years for murder in a trial in which no evidence of his guilt was provided..

In the case of Morocco, the contempt for human rights transcends the head of the Interior to reach the president. Sánchez justified, on January 19, that the Spanish socialist MEPs voted, in plenary session of the European Parliament, against the first resolution, in 26 years, on human rights in Morocco. It asked Rabat, among other things, for the release of three influential imprisoned journalists and that of Nasser Zefzafi, leader of the peaceful revolt of the Rif, sentenced to 20 years. The PSOE and the French extreme right joined in the Eurochamber their votes to reject the resolution, which was approved by a large majority.

That was not a surprise. In October 2021, when the reconciliation of Spain with Morocco had not yet been sealed, the Spanish socialists had already urged their European co-religionists to vote for the Vox candidate, the former Bolivian coup president Jeanine Áñez, for the Sakharov Prize.. The objective was to prevent the Saharawi activist Sultana Khaya from being among the finalists for the human rights award. They made it.

In Morocco there is a prisoner of conscience, the octogenarian Mohamed Ziane, former Minister of Human Rights, who has Spanish nationality —his mother was from Malaga and he was born in that city—, in addition to the Moroccan. He has been serving a three-year prison sentence since November for a string of alleged crimes. Basically, he is in jail because he dared to denounce in a video the prolonged absences from the country of Mohamed VI and asked him to abdicate to make way for his son..

The parliamentary group of the Popular Party asked the government in writing in January if it had information about the case and if Ziane had been offered the support of the Spanish consulate in Rabat. As in all other questions about human rights and freedom of the press in the Maghreb, the Executive answered evasively. In his reply, he even omitted the name of the person in whose fate the popular had been interested..

There are influential socialists who, despite not being in government, are equally insensitive to human rights in North Africa. Former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero did not reply, for example, to a letter sent to him in April by wives and a mother of Moroccan prisoners of conscience, begging him to carry out work in his country similar to the one he carried out in Venezuela, where he did achieved the release of several opponents.

The socialist government applies a double yardstick. While turning his back on Maghrebi dissidents, he goes out of his way to pay attention to Latin Americans. In February, for example, it offered Spanish nationality to the 222 prisoners of conscience released by Nicaragua, deprived of their nationality and expelled to the United States.. “Spain is home to the defenders of democracy and freedom,” José Manuel Albares, Minister of Foreign Affairs, tweeted at the time, without specifying that this refuge was not suitable for Arabs..

The Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation has just inaugurated its Democracy Program, which includes scholarships in Spain, whose purpose is to support human rights defenders, but only in Latin America and Europe, according to its website..

The PP is not free of dust and straw in terms of human rights either. In the era of Mariano Rajoy at the helm of the Executive, in 2013, side by side with France, he prevented a proposal from the Obama Administration from prospering. The Department of State wanted to extend the mandate of the Minurso (United Nations contingent deployed in Western Sahara) so that it would have jurisdiction over human rights, something that worried Morocco. Paris and Madrid stopped Washington. The Spanish government also kept a cautious silence in the face of the repression of the peaceful revolt of the Rif (2017-18), the largest of all that Morocco has experienced during the reign of Mohamed VI.

Surprising as it may seem, the only Spanish Prime Minister who publicly expressed his concern for a prisoner of conscience in Morocco, the journalist Ali Lmrabet, was, in December 2003, José María Aznar. “I have spoken and I have expressed my interest in that person,” he declared after being received in audience in Marrakech by Mohamed VI. Lmrabet, director of the weeklies Demain and Douman, closed by the Moroccan Justice, was then serving a four-year prison sentence.

The Alaouite monarch pardoned him the month after meeting with Aznar. The journalist, with strong ties to Spain – he lives in exile in Barcelona – then traveled to Madrid. “I took advantage of Aznar's attendance at the presentation of a book at the Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies to approach him and thank him for his support,” recalls Lmrabet over the phone.