Moroccan Journalist to Sue Police for Torture in Controversial Abortion Case

The case of the journalist’s alleged abortion is comparable to a political case, says Maître Mohamed Sadkou, a lawyer at the Rabat Bar and the defense of the journalist. He announced the news of her deposition, after studying the case against the police for torture and inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment on his client, continues the same statement.

The counsel also believes that the tampered and truncated consultation report is written by the doctor and "accounts for both the confessions the police wanted to obtain and the reality of the physical examination she underwent without her consent," despite the formal protests of the victim. According to the lawyer’s remarks reported by HuffPost, the purpose of all these manipulations is to force his client to confess.

As she was leaving her gynecologist’s office for an emergency due to a hemorrhage on August 31, 2019, the journalist Hajar Raissouni was forced against her will and outside any legal procedure to an extremely violent "counter-expertise" medical examination, it is claimed.

In view of these events, everything suggests that this case is political. Her uncle drives the point home by admitting that his niece "is a courageous journalist who deals with sensitive subjects and that the authorities are trying to silence her. This is a false morals case and a real political case: the questions they asked her had nothing to do with the abortion. It is the independent press that is still being attacked here," he said in the same statement.

For the journalist’s defense, this case "raises many other questions than that of the right to abortion and in particular that of freedom of the press and the independence of justice in Morocco".

As for the Prosecutor of the King, before whom the journalist appeared following her arrest, the detractors of this case are on the wrong track. "The arrest of the journalist has nothing to do with her profession," the prosecutor of the king said. "It is due to her visit to a clinic that was controlled mainly on the basis of information obtained by the judicial police on the habitual practice of abortions," he continued. Faced with the charges of "illegal abortion" and "extramarital sexual relations", Hajar Raissouni risks two years in prison, her defense recalls.