Human Rights in POLISARIO-controlled Refugee Camps
The most severe accusations of human rights abuses by the Polisario Front have been about the detention, killing and the abusive treatment of Moroccan prisoners of war from the late 70s to 2006. Other accusations were that some of the population are kept in the Tindouf refugee camps against their will and did not enjoy freedom of expression. Moroccan newspapers have aired reports of demonstrations being suppressed violently by POLISARIO forces in the Tindouf camps, but these reports have not been confirmed by international media or human rights organizations.
Several international and Spanish human rights and aid organizations are active in the camps on a permanent basis, and contest the Moroccan allegations; there are several people and organizations that claim the Tindouf camps are a model for running refugee camps democratically. In November 2012, the Representative of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Algeria, Mr. Ralf Gruenert stated: “We have not seen cases of torture in the Saharawi refugee camps”.
In April 2010, the Sahrawi government called on the UN to supervise Human rights in the liberated territories (Free Zone) and refugee camps, hoping that Morocco would do the same.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Western Sahara
Famous quotes containing the words human, rights and/or refugee:
“Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other “isms,” it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.”
—John Frederick Nims (b. 1913)