On March 2 last year, the Official Gazette of the State (BOE) published an announcement by the Ministry of Culture to tender for works on the La Paz Spanish School in El Aaiún, which indicated in brackets the African city in “Morocco”. Until that point, according to legal sources, Moroccan sovereignty over the capital of Western Sahara had never been explicitly recognized in a provision published in the official gazette. The culture precludes correcting this supposed error.
The controversial turn of the Spanish position in the dispute, which President Pedro Sánchez expressed in his letter to King Mohamed VI “realistic” to resolve the dispute over the former Spanish colony. However, it did not go so far as to recognize Morocco's sovereignty over an autonomous territory that the United Nations continues to consider pending decolonization and for which Spain has a special responsibility in its legal capacity as an administrative power.
BOE of August 29, 2023, in which El Aaiún is located in Morocco. BOE
The location of the Sahrawi capital in the Kingdom of Morocco could be due to an omission on the part of the official who drafted the tender, since it was processed together with those of five other tenders for work in culturally dependent educational centers in cities, these yes, clearly Moroccan: Tetouan, Al Hoceima, Nador, Tangier and Casablanca. In any case, this was not an isolated case, as it was repeated in the announcement of the award ceremony for the work on the La Paz School in El Aaiún, published in the BOE of August 29th.
Nor was it an error on the part of the staff who prepared the official bulletin, since in the act of awarding the works by the contracting party of the Cultural Infrastructure and Equipment Management, an autonomous body dependent on this Ministry, dated July 18 In 2023 the school will be relocated to “El Aaiún (Morocco)”.
The representative of the Polisario Front in Spain, Abdulah Arabi, has sent a letter to the Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun in which he expresses his “strong rejection of the inadmissible designation of El Aaiún as a Moroccan city” and calls on him to take action that “the Spanish government does not contribute to hindering the legitimate right of the Sahrawi people to self-determination and independence.”
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The International Association of Lawyers for Western Sahara (IAJUWS) has gone a step further and submitted to the Urtasun Panel a request for the correction of errors based on Law 39/2015, which states that “public administrations at any time ex officio or ex officio… “At the request of the interested parties, all material errors, whether actual or arithmetical, present in their acts shall be corrected”; and also in the BOE Organizational Decree, which states: “Errors that do not constitute a change in the meaning of the provisions.” […]The correction of which is deemed appropriate to avoid possible confusion will be stored by the respective organizations [en este caso la gerencia de Cultura] I urge the reproduction of the text with the appropriate corrections.”
The letter from the legal association emphasizes that the BOE “is one of its tasks to certify the authenticity of the regulations” and that “failure to correct the error would essentially mean that Spain accepts the annexation of Western Sahara.” Morocco by force.”
What the IAJUWS presented on the 19th in the official register is not a mere complaint, emphasizes its president Inés Miranda, but rather the document that officially initiates the administrative procedure, which gives the administration a period of three months to process the complaint. “We understand that it was a mistake, that they will recognize that it violates international law and Spanish domestic law and they will therefore correct it. Otherwise we will have no choice but to go to court,” he warns .
Sources from the Ministry of Culture exclude any correction of the provision, claiming that “corrections to errors in the BOE are usually made immediately” and in this case not only have many months passed, but it is also an action by the previous owner of the portfolio , the socialist Miquel Iceta. However, they add that Urtasun – who, in addition to his status as a minister, also that of a spokesman for Sumar, a political formation linked to the Sahrawi cause, is committed to ensuring that this situation does not happen again , and personally communicated this to the representative of the Polisario Front. In this way, the government avoids publishing in the BOE that El Aaiún is in Western Sahara, which could lead to a diplomatic conflict with Morocco.
Believe in mistakes
The first version of this article stated that “no official Spanish document has explicitly recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the capital of Western Sahara,” referring only to the provisions published in the BOE.
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