Moroccan Activist Sentenced to 2 Years for Flag Insult on Facebook

This conviction follows a message that Abdelali Bamad, alias Bouda Ghassan, had posted on his Facebook page at the end of October 2019.
In this message, he had defended the people who had burned the Moroccan flag during a demonstration organized in Paris three years after the death of Mohcine Fikri, a fishmonger in the Hirak region.

According to the indictment, the activist had written that he "did not have the means to buy matches to burn the Moroccan flag when he was hungry". He will be presented to the prosecutor on December 23 last. At the court of first instance in Khenifra, on Thursday, January 9, the judge sentenced Abdelali Bamad to two years in prison for "insulting the national flag and the symbol of the State" after a marathon hearing of about ten hours.

This "severe conviction is part of a context of muzzling freedom of opinion," denounced Hassan El Tas, the activist’s lawyer.