The President of the National Human Rights Council (CNDH), Amina Bouayach, spoke about the measures taken by the Council to try to help the Moroccan student Brahim Saadoun, sentenced to death by a pro-Russian court in Ukraine, alongside two British citizens.
Speaking at the opening of the eighth session of the Council’s General Assembly, Bouayach said that the CNDH is actively working and increasing efforts to protect the right to life of Moroccan citizen Brahim Saadoun.
” Due to the Ukrainian State’s dissolution of the National Human Rights Institution, the Council communicated with the Russian Human Rights Commission, inviting it to intervene as much as possible to protect the rights of the Moroccan citizen”, did she say.
And Amina Bouayach to specify that “the council asked the Russian institution to do everything possible to ensure that Brahim Saadoun benefits from a fair appeal trial, and to contact the parties concerned in order to ensure the regularity of the conditions of his arrest, in accordance with international standards”.
“The CNDH, as a national human rights institution, continues its international efforts to protect the right to life of Moroccan citizen Brahim Saadoun…“, further noted Amina Bouayach.
To conclude : “We have taken the initiative to deploy international efforts and communicate with national human rights institutions in order to protect Brahim Saadoun and spare him the death penalty, a sentence for which we have always advocated the abolition , at the level of all national and international legislation”.
As a reminder, Brahim Saadoun, aged 21, was sentenced to death on June 9, along with two Britons, by the supreme court of the said “Donetsk Republic”for “having taken part in the fighting as mercenaries”.
According to his father, Taher Saadoun, the young man, naturalized Ukrainian in 2020, “is not a mercenary and has been the victim of manipulation”.
For its part, the Moroccan government reacted through its embassy in Ukraine, stating that Saadoun “was captured wearing the uniform of the State Army of Ukraine, as a member of a unit of the Ukrainian Navy” and that he “is currently imprisoned by an entity that is recognized neither by the United Nations nor by Morocco”.
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