Spanish Migrant Rights Activist Alleges Violent Expulsion from Morocco

"I was violently expelled [...] The police were waiting for me at Tanger airport, I didn’t know what was happening," she recounted at a press conference on Monday in Madrid, saying the events took place on January 23. That day, she was about to return to Morocco where she has lived for nearly 20 years. To her great surprise, the Moroccan authorities had her board a plane to Barcelona. The Spanish activist says she was prevented from drinking water or taking her medication. Her papers had been confiscated. She describes a "humiliating" treatment. Helena Maleno also confides that she was separated from her 14-year-old daughter for more than a month.

According to her, the Spanish Ministry of the Interior was informed of her expulsion. But this ministry told AFP that it "was not aware of these facts and did not participate in any way." The fifty-year-old is the subject of judicial investigations in Morocco as well as in her own country in recent years. An investigation for human trafficking in connection with her fight against migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean had indeed been dismissed by the Moroccan justice system in 2019. In April 2017, the Spanish justice had also dismissed a procedure. A procedure initiated following the transmission of a report stating the possible links of the activist with a "criminal organization".

Although she has been cleared more than once, she claims to have always been the victim of harassment. "Since April 2020, my family and I have been the victims of 37 attacks and I hold the Spanish and Moroccan governments responsible," she continued. She asks them "to stop this persecution." She confides that she has been followed several times and that the door of her home in Morocco had been forced open three times.

"Helena’s case is unfortunately the typical example of what can happen to anyone defending (migrants’) rights on the borders of the European Union," said Maria San Martin, of the Ireland-based NGO Front Line Defenders.