African securityWestern Sahara conflict reaches British court

Europeans are familiar with efforts, some of them successful, to label agricultural and consumer products produced by Jewish settlers in the West Bank as coming from the Palestinian West Bank, not from Israel, in order to allow consumers to make an educated decision about whether or not they wish to support Israel’s continuing occupation of that territory.

A similar effort is now underway in the United Kingdom to label produce coming from Western Sahara. The campaign, launched by campaigners for the freedom of Western Sahara, aims to weaken Morocco’s claim to, and control of, the disputed territory.

Several British government departments are facing action in the high court over complaints that goods – especially tomatoes — which come from Western Sahara but labeled as products of Morocco, are illegally benefiting from preferential tariffs which the European Union has granted to Morocco.

The plaintiffs argue Moroccan produce sold by supermarket giants Tesco and Morrisons are produced in Western Sahara by giant agribusinesses — some of them owned by King Mohammed VI, others by Moroccan conglomerates or French multinational firms – but without any benefits accruing to the indigenous Saharawi people.

The Guardian notes that the Western Sahara campaign is thus similar to the Palestinian campaign to deny goods from West Bank Jewish settlements the benefits of agreements between Israel and Brussels. Not only are the methods similar, but also the goal: to raise the costs to Israel and Morocco of what the campaigners regard as illegal occupation of another people’s territory.

The conflict over Western Sahara dates back to 1975, when, following the death of long-time ruler Francisco Franco, Spain ended its colonial rule of the territory. Spain ceded control of the territory to a joint administration by Morocco and Mauritania, but the Polisario Front – the liberation movement of the indigenous Saharawi people – refused to accept the arrangement, and launched attacks on garrisons manned by soldiers from both countries.

By 1979 Mauritania had had enough and withdrew its forces, leaving the territory under the effective control of Morocco. Morocco claimed the territory, but the international court of justice rejected that claim and instead recognized the right of the indigenous Saharawi people to self-determination. A bloody 15-year was between the Moroccan army and the Polisario Front ensued, ending in an uneasy ceasefire in 1991.

Successive UN efforts to resolve the conflict have so far failed.

Morocco insists that the Western Sahara is part of its historical patrimony, and is unwilling to go beyond offering the Saharawi a limited local autonomy in what Morocco describes as the kingdom’s “southern provinces.”

“This is not a large-scale issue for consumers in Britain,” concedes John Gurr of Western Sahara Campaign UK (WSCUK), which is behind the legal action calling for denying produce from Western Sahara the preferential treatment Moroccan goods enjoy bin the EU. “But Morocco is gaining from tax breaks for tomatoes from a country it is occupying, which is unethical. The case is against HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs] because of the tax break, which they shouldn’t be getting. It is not primarily a labelling issue. It’s about Morocco doing business in a way that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. It supports Morocco in its strategy of wiping Western Sahara from the map.”

Lawyers arguing in court on behalf of WSCUK said that products originating in the Western Sahara and imported into the United Kingdom are being wrongly treated as Moroccan for the purposes of the 2012 EU–Morocco Association Agreement.

“The people of Western Sahara are not only being denied a right to self-determination but are also having their resources plundered by an illegal occupation by Morocco,” said Rosa Curling of law firm Leigh Day. “The U.K. government, and in particular DEFRA [Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs] and HMRC, must take immediate steps to ensure it is not complicit in these actions.”

DEFRA is in charge of monitoring the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement.

The EU responded to the legal move by saying that it considers Western Sahara a non-self-governing territory and Morocco as the de facto administering power, in line with UN practice. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said last month that although the 2012 agreement with Morocco does not provide specific rules on product labelling, the European commission has its own monitoring mechanisms.

The Dutch government has admitted that parallels may be drawn between the cases of imports from the occupied Palestinian territories and Western Sahara. It said, however, that the lack of consensus on imports from the Western Sahara was the result of the limited awareness of the conflict between Morocco and Western Sahara.