On Thursday, the Ministry of the Interior returned 16 of the approximately 40 Sahrawis – some of whom were minors – who had been in the Adolfo Suárez airport in Madrid Barajas since the summer after denying their requests for international protection. The deportees flew to Marrakech (Morocco) at 11:50 p.m. on Thursday night on an Air Europa flight. Other Sahrawis who still remain there already have their return scheduled for next Sunday, on a similar flight.
One of the applicants expelled to Morocco on this flight is Hamou Ali, according to eldiario.es has advanced and confirmed EL PAÍS. This is a 30-year-old man, born in El Aaiún, capital of Western Sahara, who is deaf and mute and suffers from cancer. Sources close to his case have provided this newspaper with a photograph in which he appears on board the plane with his hands tied with a cord. According to these sources, the man was taken up after “a lot of resistance” on his part.
Once they have landed in Morocco, some of them have been detained by local authorities and are being interrogated, according to the asylum seekers’ lawyers. Before that flight on Thursday night, the Interior had already tried on several occasions to return these citizens to Morocco, but they refused to board.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, explained that each case “is evaluated individually” and that they are governed by “criteria and requirements established by national and international law on protection.” In some cases, the applicants also requested that the stateless person procedure be applied to them, by rejecting Moroccan nationality. These citizens have been deported despite having their Sahrawi origin accredited by the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso), being part of the census carried out by Spain in 1974 and having favorable reports from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to authorize their entry.
In these reports, UNHCR reminded the Government that the convention on the status of stateless persons stipulates that “States shall not expel any stateless person who is legally present in the territory of such States.” It also cited the manual of that UN agency which states that “to ensure that procedures are fair and efficient, States are advised to refrain from expelling an individual from their territory while the outcome of the process is pending.” For this reason, UNHCR urged the Government of Spain to “authorize the entry of the applicant into the territory in order to continue with the statelessness procedure.”
Podemos, one of the groups that has most monitored the situation of the Sahrawis in Barajas during the last month, has condemned the start of the expulsions. The formation “considers it extremely serious that the PSOE Government” has returned them and “underlines that different socialist officials are maneuvering so that this violation of fundamental rights occurs without witnesses and without the possibility of scrutiny by the representatives of the citizens.” “, according to a statement distributed by that party.
The almost 40 Sahrawis who were in the asylum and inadmissible rooms of Barajas had arrived on different flights since the end of August. As soon as they were at the airport, they requested asylum from the Government of Spain and in some cases, for the statelessness procedure to be initiated. They were all denied. Several of them had their files and documentary evidence – photographs, videos, sentences, police summonses – that would demonstrate the persecution by the Moroccan authorities and the risk they ran if they were returned. During their stay in Barajas, the applicants reported unsanitary conditions in the rooms where they stayed, bedbugs and rationed food. Part of the Sahrawis even went on a hunger strike for several days as a form of protest against this situation.
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