Western Sahara is the territory in north-west Africa bordered by Morocco in the north, Algeria and Mauritania in the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. A former Spanish colony, it’s listed by the United Nations as one of only 17 territories that remain without self-government.
The court also found that there were no legal obstacles to the decolonisation of Western Sahara. This includes the right to self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the people of the territory. The absence of a dedicated mechanism has affected and continues to affect the visibility of events on the ground. For example, protesters in the occupied territory of Western Sahara are repeatedly subjected to human rights violations during demonstrations. This increases the possibility of more violations that impair the search for justice and accountability.
The Western Sahara mission also stands out as not having attained its purpose through the organisation of a referendum. Previous UN missions charged with this task did organise referendums in Namibia and in East Timor. The two successful missions had some sort of human rights oversight mechanism stemming from their mandates.
Secondly, it explores ways through which this absence of explicit language in the mandate is – or can be – remedied in practice based on legal doctrine and methodology. By establishing the emergence in customary international law of a norm of human rights monitoring for peacekeeping operations, I am able to strengthen the assumption of a highly irregular nature of the UN’s Western Sahara mission.
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