Delivering Morocco’s statement at the 11th Conference of the Parties to the UNTOC, Farhane said that Morocco has developed, in 2013, its immigration and asylum strategy, regularizing the status of thousands of people, providing them with access to labor market, children’s schooling, vocational training, association and cooperative creation, and health care services.
He explained that the strategy is impregnated with the founding principles of human rights and humanitarian norms, in both conception and practice. According to him, this aims to provide beneficiaries with the protection they are guaranteed, in accordance with the Kingdom’s international commitments.
At the same time, Morocco has been able, over the past five years under the principle of shared responsibility and the imperative of sub-regional, regional and international cooperation, to abort more than 350,000 irregular migration attempts, to dismantle more than 1,300 trafficking networks, and to rescue at sea more than 90,000 migrants, the diplomat said.
The Kingdom has also initiated, for the benefit of vulnerable categories of migrants, assisted voluntary repatriation programs, which is, today, a reference model of South-South cooperation in promoting sustainable solutions, said Farhane.
Bilaterally, Morocco and Spain have adopted, through Spanish Government President Pedro Sánchez’s visit to the Kingdom last April, a roadmap that includes, among other things, cooperation in the field of migration, he recalled.
“It is important to emphasize that the mechanisms of collaboration have demonstrated their operational effectiveness, including joint maritime, land and air patrols between [Spain’s] Guardia Civil and the Royal Gendarmerie, the exchange of information and police collaboration to dismantle human trafficking networks, as well as the creation of police cooperation centers in Tangier and Algeciras.”
At the level of the African continent, HM King Mohammed VI, in his capacity as “Leader of the African Union (AU) on the issue of migration”, has initiated the elaboration of the “African Agenda for Migration”, including the proposal to create the “African Migration Observatory” as a specialized AU institution in Rabat, whose statutes were adopted at the 33rd Summit of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, held in February 2020.
This African Migration Observatory will provide the African continent with an effective tool to generate better knowledge, understanding and control of the migration phenomenon, to develop the collection, analysis and exchange of data between African countries, said Farhane.
