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Spain must work to end colonialism in Western Sahara

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Brussels, 20 June 2020 (SPS) - Deputies of the European Parliament called Wednesday the Spanish Government, in a letter sent to the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, to speed up the decolonization process in Western Sahara and assume its historical and legal responsibilities towards the Sahrawi people.
The European MPs  said in a letter that the recent decision of the Supreme Court which establishes that the fact of being born in Western Sahara before 1975 doesn’t give the right to the Spanish nationality of origin, is “another denial from Spain towards its legal and historical responsibility and of its occupation for several years of Western Sahara which was its 53rd province and which had representatives in the legislature (Curtis), before being deliberately divided by Madrid and illegally given to Morocco,” as part of Madrid agreements of 14 November 1975.
The letter broached the historic decision of the International Court of Justice in 1975 which judged that Morocco doesn’t have any sovereignty over the territory of Western Sahara, which was reaffirmed by the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs in 2002, in a different form, i.e. that “Madrid’s arrangement didn’t transfer the sovereignty of Western Sahara and didn’t grant to any of the signatories the status of the administering power, a situation that Spain can’t transfer unilaterally because it contradicts with the legal and political reality.”
The European MPs expressed their strong condemnation of this decision, which “reflects the clear political intentions against the Sahrawi people and the decolonization issue of Western Sahara,” demanding that “the Prime minister takes the responsibility of this phase and takes all the measures to respond to it, starting with the efforts aimed at establishing high-level diplomatic relations with the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the granting of the Spanish nationality to the descendants of the former Spanish colony (Western Sahara)…” (SPS)
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