Morocco Demands Legal Action Against Polisario Leader as Spain-Morocco Tensions Persist

"The hospitalization of Brahim Ghali has broken the trust between Spain and Morocco to the point that the diplomatic crisis between the two countries is far from being resolved," comments El Pais, explaining that the kingdom has defined a new strategy after the migration crisis in Ceuta. The Moroccan authorities are conditioning the thawing of the crisis on the future of the Polisario leader, who is due to appear before Judge Santiago Pedraz of the National Court on September 1, says the Rabat correspondent, Francisco Peregil, in this article on the new tensions between the two countries.

"We do not want to think that Rabat is conditioning the normalization of relations to something that is not in the hands of the government," diplomatic sources indicate, recalling that "in Spain there is a separation of powers." In a statement to the same newspaper, the Spanish Foreign Minister, Arancha Gonzalez Laya, insists that her country "has never sought this crisis, nor has it fueled it. What we want is to leave it behind as soon as possible." "We are respectful and we want them to be respectful of us," she hammered.

According to the publication, government sources have confided that "Spain had intended to inform Morocco of Ghali’s reception, but this fact was delayed because Spain was then fighting to prevent the EU from including Morocco on its gray list of tax havens, by transposing the recent decision of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on countries with deficiencies in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing - which involved obstacles in access to credit institutions - and did not want to mix the two issues."

The correspondent of the Spanish newspaper also writes that "King Mohammed VI has never renounced the annexation of the two Spanish cities (Ceuta and Melilla) in North Africa, but he considers that this task does not fall to his generation, but to that of his son."