EU

Morocco has made significant progress on a number of human rights issues since the revision of its Constitution in 2011 and the creation of the National Council of Human Rights (CNDH) in 2012 but the EU must continue using its soft power to help Rabat take up other sensitive issues.

Our latest report titled “Human Rights in Morocco: Achievements and Challenges Ahead”, based on a mission in Morocco, takes stock of encouraging improvements concerning freedom of association, peaceful assembly, women’s rights, domestic violence, and children’s rights. It also outlines a number of remaining obstacles to overcome in order to achieve satisfactory results de jure and in practice and thereby meet international standards.

The number of declared associations in Morocco has currently reached 130,000, including 4,500 working in the field of human rights, but some which challenge the status of its southern provinces, also known as Western Sahara, are still waiting for their registration.

In 2016, more than 11,000 demonstrations involving 800,000 participants were registered. Some were not peaceful, as it was the case in Gdim Izik in 2010 where eleven police officers and a firefighter were killed by protesters. Twenty-four protestors were sentenced to long prison terms by a military court. Under pressure of the CNDH, a new law was afterwards adopted that prohibited civilians from being tried by military courts and in 2017 the indicted protesters were prosecuted by a civilian court.

The constitution revised in 2011 allows for equality of male and female Moroccan citizens. The Moudawana (Family Code) revised in 2004 allows for improvement of women’s rights, making it easier for women to get divorced and providing more rights regarding the custody of children. In 2005, a royal decree allowed a Moroccan mother married to a foreign father to give her citizenship to her children. There are currently vivid debates about equal rights in inheritance cases and progress is still needed in practice concerning the right to health, access to education, and labor opportunities. A recent law has criminalized domestic violence but not marital rape.

The CNDH and its 13 regional branches have been instrumental in the dynamics towards positive changes, reporting and disseminating information about violations as well as bringing together stakeholders to collaborate on solutions. However, the CNDH is aware that it still has a number of challenges to take up, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the human rights of the LGBTI people.

The CNDH fully complies with the Paris Principles and holds constructive dialogue without concessions with authorities. Its president, Driss El Yazami, has been honored with many prestigious awards, including in January of this year the Order of Leopold, a Royal Order from the Kingdom of Belgium, established in 1832.

Because of the positive dynamics driven by the CNDH, it is of utmost importance for Brussels to go on using its soft power to contribute to the advancement of human rights in Morocco.

The EU has often used commercial agreements with third countries to promote human rights and good practices. For years, partnerships between the EU and Morocco have contributed to the development and the well-being of the Moroccan population and have provided the EU a leverage to raise human rights issues in the political dialogues between Brussels and Rabat.

The EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement in force since 2007 and due for renewal in July 2018 will soon provide a new opportunity to consolidate this fruitful policy.

Other areas of cooperation such as the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), the Association Agreement, and the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement, in addition to other regional and bi-lateral agreements, have been used and must be further enlarged to improve the overall human rights standards in Morocco.

In order to draw attention to health and safety issues in the workplace, the European Commission and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) has launched a new campaign aimed at promoting various techniques for the management of hazardous substances in the workplace.

According to the EU institutions, workers continue to be exposed to substances that include carcinogens. At the moment, 21 substances that have already been limited or proposed to be limited and the European Commission recently proposed to limit workers’ exposure to cadmium and its inorganic compounds; beryllium and inorganic beryllium compounds; arsenic acid and its salts, as well as inorganic arsenic compounds; formaldehyde and 4,4′-Methylene-bis(2-chloroaniline), also known as MOCA.

European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility, Marianne Thyssen, said that on behalf of the Commission, that the campaign to raise awareness and to actually limit workers’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals will continue.

“This is a key priority for the European Commission because the European Pillar of Social Rights entitles workers to a high level of protection of their safety and health at work. EU-OSHA’s campaigns are leading the way in reaching workplaces across Europe and helping organisations adopt effective approaches to occupational safety and health management with the necessary tools,” added Thyssen.

EU-OSHA’s campaign has the backing of Bulgaria’s  Deputy Minister of Labour and Social PolicyLazar Lazarov. the current holder of the Council of Ministers rotating presidency, who underlined the importance of improving awareness of the existing rules and regulations and how best to comply with them

A multilingual website to support the campaign, along with an e-tool that is already accessible in English, will soon be available in three country versions (Austria, Estonia and Romania).  A database of almost 700 practical tools and guidance documents from 11 member states (Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and the UK) is also available.

The EU got “limited” effect for the €9bn it spent trying to modernise Turkey in recent years, auditors have said. EU funds spent on improving rule of law, governance, and democratic standards “insufficiently addressed some fundamental needs”, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said in Luxembourg on Wednesday (14 March).

Funds spent on impartiality of judges, anti-corruption measures, organised crime, and press freedom “barely addressed some fundamental needs,” it said. Turkey had been “backsliding” on reforms since 2013 due to “lack of political will”, the ECA added. It “worsened” the situation “by the large-scale dismissals, suspensions of public officials, and restrictions on civil society” as part of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “repressive post-coup measures” from 2016 onward, the ECA said.

The post-coup crackdown “undermined Turkey’s position vis-a-vis the EU” and “affected Turkey’s administrative capacity” by their “sheer scale”, it said. “We therefore consider that the [€9 billion] effectiveness was only limited,” the ECA said.

The EU audit noted that Turkey bore the greater responsibility for how the money was used because the Central Finance and Contracts Unit in Erdogan’s treasury managed 85 percent of the EU spending. But it also criticised the European Commission for failing to impose stricter conditions on how its funds were used – in a lesson for EU enlargement policy in the Western Balkans. The ECA report comes ahead of EU leaders’ plans to discuss Turkey relations at a summit in Brussels next week.

It also comes ahead of an EU-Turkey summit in March and a commission progress report on Turkey in April, setting the scene for EU decisions of future funds for Turkey in the EU’s post-2020 budget. The ECA report looked at a small sample of projects implemented in the EU programme between 2007 and 2016 and visited Turkey for two weeks last year as part of its assessment. It looked at EU-funded projects such as creating a network of judicial spokespersons, improving border surveillance on the Turkey-Syria and Turkey-Iraq boundaries, and buying IT equipment for anti-money laundering bureaus.

The report noted that 75 percent of Turkish NGOs or other associations advocating civil rights had vanished in Erdogan’s 2016 post-coup measures. It added that the commission had “systematically reported serious attacks against press freedom in Turkey” ever since that time.