Migration policy and international human rights frameworks in Morocco: tensions and contradictions

ABSTRACT

In 2013, Morocco announced the adoption of a new, ‘humane’ migration policy. The implementation of the reform, however, has been characterised by an apparent contradiction: while Morocco has leveraged the humanitarian and international orientation of the policy as a foreign policy tool, this new political framework has not so far been translated into law and has been accompanied by persisting violations of migrants’ rights, especially in border areas. Most literature on the topic observes these discrepancies as a sign of the incomplete or ‘indecisive’ character of Moroccan migration policies. Building on the literature on human rights politics and migration policy, in this article we ask instead: what do these contradictions tell us about the trajectory of the Moroccan state, and its relation to the international human rights regime? These discrepancies, we argue, speak to the process of regime hybridisation that has characterised Morocco’s political transition since the 1990s. Morocco’s transition from authoritarianism to a hybrid political regime has been marked by political openings towards liberalism, social mobilisation, and closer engagement with the international human rights framework, which have helped Morocco recraft its international image as a ‘modern’ and ‘stable’ country. These phenomena, however, have coexisted alongside the survival of practices of authoritarian rule. The National Strategy on Immigration and Asylum (SNIA) conforms to Morocco’s formal alignment to the international human rights regime. However, the lack of legal harmonisation grants the state the flexibility to manoeuvre the policy according to its European and African foreign political interests, thus leaving the progress in terms of migrants’ rights vulnerable to sudden setbacks.

KEYWORDS:

• Morocco
• human rights politics
• international human rights regime
• hybridisation
• CWM

Acknowledgements

We finished writing this article in the midst of a global pandemic, and we thank the solidarity networks that have supported all the people who felt their fragility and limits. We would like to thank Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen for her helpful comments and suggestions in bringing this article to light.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ministère délégué auprès du Ministre des Affaires Étrangères, de la Coopération Africaine et des Marocains résidant à l’Étranger, Royaume du Maroc (2018).

2 Plan d’Action National en matière de Démocratie et des Droits de l’Homme au Maroc (PANDDH), accessible at: https://cndh.ma/fr/processus-delaboration-du-panddh/presentation-du-plan-daction-national-en-matiere-de-democratie-et.

3 European Commission (2013).

4 See the complete list of documents issued between 2013 and 2019 on: https://www.ohchr.org/FR/Countries/MENARegion/Pages/MAIndex.aspx.

5 UN Human Rights Committee (2016).

6 UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (2014).

7 UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2017)

8 UN (2019).

9 UN Human Rights Committee (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is drawn from research connected to a postdoctoral contract awarded to Mercedes G. Jiménez-Alvarez by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid [BOUC 07/24/2017] and the postdoctoral Fellowship Juan de la Cierva-Formación awarded to Keina R. Espiñeira Gonzalez by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain [FJCI-2016-29926].