The Constitutional Court has granted protection to the citizen of Moroccan origin and naturalized Belgian in 1989 Ali Aarrass, who was extradited by Spain to Morocco in 2008, where he suffered serious torture, according to United Nations reports. The court has estimated that due to the extradition procedure, after being claimed by Morocco as a suspected jihadist, and in view of the consequences of his surrender, Aarrass suffered a violation of his fundamental rights, specifically for not having had judicial protection. effective and have suffered, on the other hand, torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, proscribed by the Spanish Constitution.
The decision to grant this protection implies the annulment of several decisions of the ordinary jurisdiction in Spain, which will allow the plaintiff to request compensation from the State of around three million euros. The appeal has been successful by six votes in favor and five against (the judges Enrique Arnaldo, Concepción Espejel, Ricardo Enríquez and César Tolosa, from the conservative sector, and that of the judge Laura Díez, from the progressive group). These magistrates stated that the United Nations reports were not conclusive or have not been considered binding on national authorities on previous occasions.
In fact, two draft sentences were discussed in court—one upholding the appeal and the other not—because the matter is relatively new, referring to the legal effects of United Nations resolutions on cases of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. In the case of Alí Aarrás, the UN Human Rights Committee has already warned of the risk he ran of receiving them. His surrender occurred after he was investigated in Spain for his alleged relationship with the attacks that took place in Casablanca in 2003, a case that was archived.
In 2008 he was arrested again and extradited to Morocco in 2010 at the request of the authorities of this country. In December of this second year, he reported having been tortured in prison by means of shocks, rape with objects and drowning, among other procedures. In 2014, the aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Committee prepared a report that reported on the complaint made and that the National Court had not taken it into consideration. The report highlighted the existence of such practices in various cases, considering that they were not isolated events.
In 2011, Ali Aarrass was sentenced in Morocco to 15 years in prison for the crime of belonging to a terrorist organization. The sentence was reduced two years later to 12 years in prison. In 2013, another report from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was released in which Aarrass' complaints were given credence. The report included the request that the convicted man be released as it was estimated that his sentence had been based on alleged confessions obtained under torture. All of this led the UN Human Rights Committee to conclude that Spain had not adequately assessed the risk that Aarrass would be subjected to torture when his extradition was agreed. This committee considered that the surrender had, therefore, represented a “violation” of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In view of all this data, the Constitutional Court has agreed to grant the amparo, which entails the annulment of various decisions of the National Court and the Supreme Court by which the claims made by Aarrass over recent years were rejected. The order of the court of guarantees is that this long process returns to its first steps in the National Court so that it issues a resolution “respectful of the fundamental right” violated, that is, in accordance with the right to effective judicial protection.
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