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HRW calls on Morocco, Spain to end abuse of immigrants

11 February 2014 02:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Human Rights Watch on Monday called on Morocco and Spain to end the abusive treatment of sub-Saharan immigrants, nine of whom drowned trying to reach Spain's north African territory of Ceuta last week, APA reports quoting AFP.

Morocco has struggled to cope with a rising tide of sub-Saharan Africans heading to its northern shores in their desperate quest to cross the Mediterranean. Its security forces have increasingly come under fire for beating, arbitrarily detaining and deporting illegal immigrants to Algeria.

Starkly illustrating the human cost of the problem facing Spain and Morocco, hundreds of sub-Saharans tried to swim to Ceuta from the nearby Moroccan town of Fnideq on Thursday, with the bodies of nine, including one women, pulled from the water near the border.

HRW welcomed an operation launched by Rabat in January to regularise the situation of the estimated 25,000 illegal immigrants in Morocco, in the face of allegations that several had died at the hands of the police last year.

But the rights group charged, in a report launched on Monday and based on interviews with 67 sub-Saharans, that despite some improvement since the new policy was announced, the security forces "commonly beat, otherwise abuse and sometimes steal" from migrants.

The interior ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.

But an official response published in the HRW report stated Morocco's treatment of foreign nationals took place with "strict respect" for the law and international conventions.

"We want Morocco to make its security forces understand that migrants have rights," HRW's Katya Salmi told a news conference in Rabat, urging authorities to introduce "firm procedures" to ensure those rights are respected, and to put an end to the beating of migrants.

Moroccan rights experts say getting security forces to change the way they treat illegal immigrants is a massive task, which requires instilling a "new mentality" among tens of thousands of poorly-trained personnel.

The New York-based group also criticised the Spanish security forces for using "excessive force when they summarily expel migrants" from their territories of Ceuta and Melilla, Europe's only land borders with Africa.

And it called for an investigation into allegations police fired into the sea where the Africans were swimming on Thursday, as Moroccan and Spanish security forces tried to repel them from Ceuta.

"We are shocked by this tragedy. We want an investigation into the facts to know what security measures were taken, in response to witness accounts that rubber bullets were used," Salmi said.

The Spanish authorities have denied migrants were targeted directly, saying some were "very violent" when they approached the fence by land, and that civil guards in Ceuta only fired rubber bullets into the air to ward them off.

"We did not use anti-riot equipment when the immigrants were in the water," said the head of the Spanish government's delegation in Ceuta, Francisco Antonio Gonzalez.

In its 79-page report, HRW said Spain's expulsion of illegal immigrants violated international and European Union law, which prohibits countries from forcibly returning anyone to a place where they would face a real risk of being subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment