Assahafa.com
When discussing the legal status of the Western Sahara dispute, there is a key point that must always be emphasized: legally speaking, the issue has gone through three phases.
First phase
The first phase spanned the period between 1957 and 1965. The most critical development in this phase came in 1963, when Mauritania began competing with Morocco in claiming the Sahara. Yet, the prevailing concern within the UN General Assembly back then essentially had to do with the existence of a bilateral dispute between Morocco and Spain over sovereignty over the disputed region. This, as I show in my book, “The Self-Determination Delusion: How Activist Scholars and Journalists Have Hijacked the Western Sahara Case,” is confirmed by the official UN records and the statements made by various member states during that period, all of which called on Spain to end its occupation of of the Sahara and negotiate with Morocco the final status of the territory.
In addition, statements issued by the Chair of the Decolonization Committee until 1965 clearly show the solid conviction within the United Nations that it regarded this territorial dispute as a bilateral dispute between Morocco and Spain. This is indeed what was confirmed by Resolution 2072, through which the General Assembly called on Spain to negotiate with Morocco the ongoing dispute between the two countries over sovereignty in both Sidi Ifni – a coastal Moroccan town that was formerly Spanish territory – and the Sahara.
Second phase
The second phase lasted from 1966 to 2002. It is during this period that Morocco urged the General Assembly to pressure Spain to allow the populations of the Sahara to exercise their right to self-determination through a referendum under UN supervision. And from that point onward, the self-determination approach — rather than negotiations over sovereignty — went on to become the principal legal framework for the UN political process. This was a severe blow to Morocco, which saw how the international debate on the conflict began leaning from the need for a workable resolution bilaterally negotiated between Madrid and Rabat to the idea of establishing a micro-state in Morocco’s southern provinces.
Throughout this entire phase — Morocco’s excessive goodwill and its eagerness to cooperate in good faith with the General Assembly created the conditions that made it possible for other actors – in particular Algeria – to hijack the UN’s mediation efforts. From being the country that first introduced the Sahara question to the UN floor as it sought international backing for the liberation of its southern provinces from Spanish occupation, Morocco became increasingly sidelined or challenged in decolonization-themed discussions about the fate of the Sahara. In other words, as Mauritania and Algeria entered the Sahara fray with their own “national interests” in mind, Morocco ceased to be the sole or main party to the Sahara dispute.
Instead of a confrontation between Morocco’s push for complete decolonization from European colonization and Spain’s determination to prolong its occupation of the Sahara, the territorial dispute became a more complex equation with different actors with visions and interests that sometimes collided and other times converged, depending on the circumstances. And to Rabat’s utter dismay, the only definitive result from this chaotic period was that the General Assembly shifted its position to emphatically embracing the Sahrawis’ “right to self-determination.” This, it goes without saying, eventually steered the political process in a direction that aligned with Algeria’s geostrategic ambitions to build a micro-state in southern Morocco.
Thanks to Algeria’s financial power and the ideological prestige its revolutionary liberation from French colonialism enjoyed among developing nations at the time, it was able to construct a narrative that served the separatist thesis. Algeria and its allies thus created the ideological atmosphere that made it possible for them to exploit the obscure and politicized advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice to achieve two goals. The first was to undermine the legal legitimacy of the Tripartite Agreement signed between Morocco, Spain, and Mauritania, and the second was to get the General Assembly, and with it the Security Council and the bulk of the international community, to embrace the “inalienable principle” of “Sahrawi self-determination” as the only way to resolve the Sahara dispute.
And so, Algeria equally managed to build a diplomatic front that created a significant momentum serving its main strategic objective: isolating Morocco from its strategic continental depth. Despite Morocco’s recovery of its southern provinces via the Tripartite Agreement, the General Assembly — which at that time was the UN body in charge of resolving the conflict — remained firmly attached to the referendum option as the only approach likely to allow the inhabitants of the territory to exercise their right to self-determination. This was on full display in the resolutions the General Assembly adopted between 1979 and 1990, all of which emphasized the necessity of enabling the territory’s populations to exercise their right to determine their future and establish an independent state.
Third phase
However, the equation gradually changed during the third phase, in which the Security Council took the lead and became the sole UN body responsible for resolving the Sahara dossier. When the Council assumed full and undivided responsibility for the dispute in 1990, it initially explored the possibility of organizing a referendum that would allow the inhabitants of the Sahara to choose between integration with Morocco or full independence. Yet, fundamental disagreements between the parties regarding voter eligibility led to the failure of both the Settlement Plan and the iterations – the first in 2001 and the second in 2003 – of the Baker Plan.
Since 2003, and after observing the failure of the referendum approach, the Security Council has definitively and irreversibly abandoned the referendum option. From that moment on, the ICJ advisory opinion and the General Assembly resolutions adopted until 1990 became irrelevant. In other words, as I showed in a March 2023 article, the Security Council’s resolutions have rendered ICJ advisory opinion redundant, replacing it as the sole legal frame of reference for the Western Sahara dossier.
Yet, while the legal aspect of the dispute has been conclusively settled by the direction UN resolutions have taken over the past three decades, many experts, academics, and researchers are still reluctant to accept that the Security Council has moved beyond the referendum option. As a result, they constantly seek to revert the academic and political debate back to square one, insisting that the 1975 ICJ advisory opinion and the General Assembly resolutions adopted between 1979 and 1990 remain the ongoing political process’s primary legal reference.
Even more critical, despite knowing perfectly well that the Security Council has settled the matter in favor of Morocco’s most realistic plan, many countries – especially in Europe – have continued to weaponize this now irrelevant self-determination. In so doing, they sought to either signal their “progressive” virtue or maintain ambiguous strategic positions that do not reflect the unequivocal legal transformations the dispute has undergone from a legal standpoint since 2003.
More often than not, these supporters of the separatist thesis are eager to oppose the very UN resolutions they pretend to invoke in their performative quest for “final and just settlement” of the Sahara dispute. They have therefore continued to misleadingly pose as champions of international law, arguing that recent political developments and the legal consensus gathering in favor of Morocco’s Autonomy are against the “original mission” of the UN-led process.
Detached from the legal reality and the diplomatic consensus taking shape right under their eyes, they maintain that the current, prevailing momentum constitutes “a blatant violation of international law.” But what exactly is international law in the Sahara dossier? To answer that question, it is essential to bear in mind that the Security Council operates within the framework of Article 24 of the UN Charter, which grants it the responsibility for maintaining international peace and security.
The need for critical education on legal realities
And it is this centrality of the Security Council as the ultimate custodian of international law that makes the resolutions it has adopted since 2007 the only legal framework — emphasis here on only — that should govern the UN-led process seeking to end the Sahara dispute. As such, Morocco’s Autonomy Plan, which has repeatedly been hailed by post-2007 Security Council resolutions as the most realistic and viable route to lasting resolution of the Sahara conundrum, is the only stance that aligns with international law. Indeed, from Resolution 1440 — adopted in 2018 — to Resolution 2702 (adopted in October 2024), the UN Security Council has emphatically recognized the Moroccan proposal as the most viable political path to lasting settlement of the Sahara issue. Consequently, it is those opposing the current momentum who are the ones misinterpreting and weaponizing international law for political expediency, not the other way around.
Still, it is now increasingly troubling that even some Moroccan experts and academics appear not to have grasped this legal paradigm shift that has taken place over the past three decades. They continue to believe that Morocco has not secured the legal resolution of the dispute and that hostile, Morocco-bashing rulings issued by politically motivated bodies such as the European Court of Justice are driven purely by legal considerations.
And so, as I concluded in my book, while Morocco has by now decisively won the legal and diplomatic battles for the Sahara, it is still lagging behind, especially in this digital age, on the narrative front. One sure way of countering these narrative assaults on the geopolitical and legal momentum of Morocco’s Sahara stance is to invest in “an aggressive and hard thought PR campaign that would provide “the missing – and much-needed – window into the historical, social, and legal reasons motivating Morocco’s claims to the disputed territory” and “could go a long way in ending or considerably undermining the continued appeal of Polisario’s underdog narrative,” I said toward the end of the book.
While this assessment remains relevant, I now think it should be supplemented by serious investment in another equally critical narrative front: the academic sphere. In other words, perhaps the time has come for Morocco to consider establishing specialized academic departments and endowed chairs within its universities to study the historical, geopolitical, legal, sociological, anthropological, and human-rights-based dimensions of the Western Sahara story.
The goal of such an endeavor would be to sketch out a more historically grounded and genuinely objective or constructive vision of the legal impact of Security Council resolutions on the most realistic future for the Western Sahara region. Because, given what the history of the Sahara saga has been to date, it is not only intellectually dishonest and politically absent-minded to cling to a self-determination that most serious students of the Sahara dossier know won’t work. It is politically dangerous and speaks of indifference to the tragedy of the real Sahrawis, out of pure ideological commitment to an impossible dream.
Source: Morocco word news
