Morocco’s Deep State Evades Justice: The Unfinished Business of Enforced Disappearances
✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada
Algiers, Algeria | Every year on August 30, the world marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance. Across continents, this day serves as a somber reminder of the brutality of regimes that erase human beings not only from public life but from existence itself. In Morocco, however, this commemoration is a bitter ritual of déjà vu: the makhzen persists in stonewalling truth, sabotaging accountability, and treating the demands of victims’ families as an inconvenient nuisance rather than a moral and legal obligation.
Decades after Morocco’s so-called “Equity and Reconciliation Commission” (IER) closed its files, countless cases remain unresolved. The names are seared into the national memory: Mehdi Ben Barka, Houcine El Manouzi, Abdelhaq Rouissi, Omar El Wazzouli, among many others. Families have waited for answers, but the state has chosen silence. Promises of transparency have curdled into obfuscation. Even DNA analyses—painstakingly sought by victims’ relatives—have been kept under lock and key, as if the truth itself were too dangerous to release.
The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), in its recent statement, exposed this reality with striking clarity: the state has failed to reveal burial sites, ignored calls for judicial accountability, and refused to cooperate meaningfully with the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which has flagged 13 unresolved Moroccan cases.
Impunity as State Policy
What emerges is not negligence but a deliberate policy of impunity. The Moroccan regime is willing to showcase itself internationally as a reformist monarchy while domestically suppressing any genuine path toward truth and justice. By refusing to implement the core recommendations of the IER—including constitutional reforms, institutional guarantees against recurrence, and an official apology—the monarchy reveals its true priority: shielding perpetrators, many of whom remain embedded in the very apparatus of power.
This duplicity is not merely a domestic betrayal—it is a violation of international law. Enforced disappearance is defined as a crime against humanity under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Yet Morocco has not ratified this convention, nor has it signed on to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The regime’s resistance to binding commitments speaks volumes: it intends to remain unaccountable.
Global Context of Hypocrisy
The AMDH rightly drew parallels to Gaza, where enforced disappearance is deployed as a weapon of war. Morocco’s silence in the face of such global crimes is unsurprising: a state unwilling to confront its own atrocities cannot credibly denounce others. The double standards of the international system—where powerful allies like France and the United States continue to shield Rabat—only embolden the makhzen to persist in denial.
For the families of the disappeared, time is a slow torture. Every year without answers deepens their grief. The regime’s refusal to deliver judicial truth means victims’ relatives remain trapped in a limbo of uncertainty—denied even the dignity of mourning. Worse still, this refusal signals to Moroccan society that crimes of the state can be committed with absolute impunity.
Demands for Real Justice
The AMDH has articulated clear and reasonable demands:
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Ratify all core human rights treaties, including the Convention on Enforced Disappearances and the Rome Statute.
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Reform Morocco’s penal and criminal procedure codes to explicitly criminalize enforced disappearance in line with international standards.
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Establish a national mechanism for truth and accountability, tasked with uncovering burial sites, publishing DNA results, and identifying perpetrators.
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End the culture of impunity by prosecuting those responsible, regardless of rank or affiliation.
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Prohibit the transfer or extradition of any person to a country where they face a risk of disappearance.
The Moroccan regime cannot indefinitely evade its past. So long as the fate of the disappeared remains hidden, the state itself remains hostage to its own crimes. The rhetoric of “reconciliation” without truth or accountability is a hollow charade, designed to placate international observers while betraying the very citizens who bore the brunt of repression.
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