Geneva (Switzerland), 6 March 2023 (SPS) – The permanent representative of Algeria to the United Nations Office and other International Organizations in Geneva, Ambassador Lazhar Soualem, called on the international community on Friday, especially the United Nations, to fulfil its obligations and assume its responsibilities to Western Sahara people by ensuring their inalienable and imprescriptible right to self-determination.
In an address at the 52nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Ambassador Soualem stressed the paramount importance Algeria gives to UN Security Council’s resolutions, to the relevant jurisprudence and to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice regarding the territory of Western Sahara occupied by Morocco.
The Algerian diplomat said all the aforementioned resolutions and opinions “consider the conflict as a decolonisation issue, whose settlement inevitably requires the application of the principle of self-determination.”
The permanent representative of Algeria to the United Nations Office and other International Organizations in Geneva called on all States, the UN Human Rights Council and the High Commissioner for Human Rights to “fulfil their international commitments” and “assume their responsibilities towards the people of Western Sahara, who are still under occupation.”
He also called for ensuring to Sahrawi people their inalienable and imprescriptible right to self-determination.
The people of Western Sahara, he said, “cannot remain indefinitely under the mercy and stubbornness of the occupying state of Morocco, which continues to shy away from its international commitments toward the last colony in Africa.”