EU Court to Rule on Morocco-EU Fisheries Agreements in Western Sahara Dispute

Morocco is awaiting the two rulings of the European Union’s General Court on the applicability of the fisheries and association (trade) agreements concluded in 2019 between Brussels and Morocco in Western Sahara, agreements that the Polisario Front, assisted by lawyer Gilles Devers, is trying to have overturned. The Court of Justice of the European Union, a higher court than the CJEU, had already ruled in December 2016, then in 2018 and 2019, that these agreements were not applicable to Western Sahara because the former colony had a special status, recalls EFE.

The European Commission has tried to circumvent these decisions by negotiating new agreements with Rabat in 2019 in which Western Sahara was no longer considered part of Morocco. These new agreements provided for an extension to this territory and required the consent of the Sahrawi population before their implementation.

The court is very likely to invalidate these new agreements concluded between the EU Commission and Morocco. "European leaders have tried to circumvent this sentence [of 2016] to please Morocco. But we really have reasons to hope," said Gilles Devers, in a recent interview with the Algerian digital newspaper TSA. The Polisario Front’s lawyer is confident that the European court will "invalidate these new agreements" and make a decision in favor of Western Sahara which, he points out, "is not part of Morocco and the consent of its indigenous population has not been requested. This means for example that products exported by Morocco from the Sahara to the EU, worth around 500 million euros per year, will have to be labeled as non-Moroccan and will pay 20% customs duties."

The Devers law firm intends to file a lawsuit against the EU, in case the court’s decisions are favorable to them, to demand the payment to the Polisario Front, representing the Sahrawi people, of around one billion euros for the tariffs and fishing rights collected by Morocco. It is also studying the legal mechanisms by which they can compel Rabat to return the money improperly collected over all these years to the European coffers.

How will Morocco react to these decisions that could go against it? The next few days will tell. The Sahara issue has always been at the heart of the crisis between Morocco and Spain. Morocco was already at odds with Spain, which has maintained its position on the Sahara at a time when the kingdom was calling for recognition of its sovereignty over the Sahara, as the United States did under Trump in late December 2020. In his speech last week before the United Nations General Assembly, Pedro Sanchez reiterated Spain’s position on the Sahara, advocating a "mutually acceptable" solution by the two parties.