Moroccan Journalist’s Arrest Sparks Debate on Women’s Rights and Personal Freedoms

This is a current event that relaunches the debate on individual freedoms and, more particularly, that on the control of their bodies by women in Morocco. The journalist, who risks up to two years in prison, had to undergo humiliating gynecological examinations imposed as part of the investigation that have revealed almost everything about her intimacy. In an analysis for the French newspaper, Le Monde, on the situation, Professor Mehdi Alioua evokes a real nightmare!

According to the Professor, Moroccans live in a dictatorship that imposes outdated norms on them, making women primarily responsible for social order.

Mehdi Alioua explains that while in the political sphere it is always men who lead, order, control, punish and forgive, in social life, on the other hand, the anxiety of change is sent back to women. They would be the cause of defeats, droughts, earthquakes, the loose morals of young men, etc.

In reality, according to Mehdi Alioua, this "Hajar Raïssouni" affair, which is only the visible tip of the iceberg, allows us to better understand how the judicial authorities operate: they are much more interested in the sexuality between consenting adults than in sexual violence and the protection of vulnerable persons, children and women.

This says a lot about the state of freedoms in Morocco and the way the State interferes in the private lives of citizens, considering that bodies, sexes, pleasures must be controlled and regulated... to the point of absurdity!

Fortunately, according to the analyst, nowadays, Moroccan women are fighting for their rights to be effective in their daily lives and not just on paper. Moroccans, he affirms, have freed themselves from colonial despotism and the absolute power of the Sultan to build a nation composed of free and equal citizens in rights.

If they have won the "right to have rights", they have not freed themselves from need, poverty and social injustices limiting the full exercise of their individual freedoms. According to Professor Mehdi Alioua, Morocco’s true democratic transition lies precisely at this level.

Social inequalities, he explains, are not just a matter of economics or income, but also of access to freedom. For now, we are not yet "free to be free", in the words of Hannah Arendt, and it is women who are the scapegoats of the immense generalized frustration, he laments.