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The European Court of Justice is due to discuss next week the EU-Morocco agreements allowing Rabat to export goods from Western Sahara which are contested by the separatist Polisario Front.
It is due to hold two sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday but a decision will take “several months”, a spokesperson for the Luxembourg court told AFP.
For the Polisario, Moroccan exports from the disputed territory amount to “the plunder of its natural resources”, in particular agricultural products, phosphates and fish, according to the French lawyer of the independent movement Gilles Devers.
On the other side of the argument, Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, quoted by the kingdom’s news agency MAP, said that Rabat would push back “this judicial harassment” and defend “the legitimacy of its partnership” with Europe.
On the ground, tensions rose sharply in November when Morocco sent troops to a buffer zone to reopen the only road from Morocco to Mauritania and the rest of West Africa.
The two sides have since exchanged regular fire along a UN guarded demarcation line.
A 1991 ceasefire agreement was to lead to a self-determination referendum for the former British-sized Spanish colony which is home to around one million people.
Morocco has offered autonomy but maintains that the divided territory is a sovereign part of the kingdom.
The Polisario, which fought a war for independence from 1975 to 1991, said it was always ready to join UN discussions over the territory’s future – but would not lay down its arms .
Talks broke off in March 2019.
‘Economic struggle’
Devers said the independence movement was also waging an “economic struggle” to defend the interests of the territory.
In this file photo, a woman walks past a fresh produce stand at a market in the town of Laâyoune, in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. By FADEL SENNA (AFP) Access to the European market was used “to prolong (Moroccan) colonization”, according to the longtime activist of the Sahrawi cause.
The trade figures are significant.
In 2019, Morocco exported 434 million euros ($ 524 million) of fish, tomatoes and melons from Western Sahara to Europe, the European Commission said last December, without giving a figure for them. phosphates.
In 2016, the Polisario obtained a decision from the European Court that a trade agreement between Morocco and the EU did not apply to Western Sahara.
But in 2019 the European Parliament extended trade preferences to products from the territory, which is the last on the African continent whose postcolonial status has not been settled.
The extension of preferential tariffs “contributed to the normalization and revival of EU-Morocco relations and, as such, to the maintenance of their dialogue and their constructive cooperation in the protection of human rights”, according to the European Commission.
Politically, Rabat has obtained recognition of its claim to sovereignty over the disputed territory of a growing number of African and Arab countries which have opened consulates in Western Sahara.
In January, the outgoing administration of President Donald Trump shattered decades of precedent by extending U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat signing a normalization agreement with Israel.
Other African countries and some former countries of the Eastern bloc still recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic that the Polisario leaders proclaimed in February 1976.
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