Morocco Urged Not to Extradite Detained Uyghur Man Amid Terrorism Allegations

31 July 2021 – bySylvanus@Bladi · 2 min read

Dilnur Reyhan, president of the Uyghur Institute of Europe, is asking the Moroccan government not to extradite Idris Hasan, a Uyghur national arrested at Mohammed V airport in Casablanca and then incarcerated in the Tiflet prison on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organization. In this regard, she has addressed a letter to Chakib Benmoussa, Morocco’s ambassador to France, on July 28.

In her letter, Dilnur Reyhan asks "the Moroccan government not to extradite the Uyghur computer scientist Idris Hasan", 33 years old, detained in the Tiflet prison since July 19. Upon leaving the plane, he had been arrested by the airport police of Mohammed V in Casablanca. He "was the subject of a red notice issued by Interpol, due to his suspected membership in an organization on the lists of terrorist organizations," confides a security source to Hespress.

"In principle, except in exceptional cases, all persons arrested in the context of extraditions are incarcerated in the local prison of Tiflet, because it is the prison closest to the Court of Cassation," explains, to TelQuel, Rabii Chekkouri, a lawyer at the Rabat bar. Once this first step is completed, the file will be transmitted to the Attorney General’s Office near this court, then to the Ministry of Justice. The latter will transmit it through diplomatic channels to the Chinese authorities, as Beijing ratified, at the end of January, a Sino-Moroccan extradition treaty, signed in 2016 and ratified by the Moroccan deputies in August 2017.

"The terrible situation of the Uyghur people has been widely documented, attested to both by researchers and NGOs, officially qualified as genocide by seven parliaments in the world. [...] About three million Uyghurs are detained in concentration camps and prisons because of their ethnicity and religion (Muslim)," Dilnur Reyhan also warns in her letter co-signed by five left-wing French deputies.