Commission pushes EU-Morocco trade deal, ignoring democratic processes and saharawi rights
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WSRW, 29 September 2025
Commission pushes EU-Morocco trade deal, ignoring democratic processes and saharawi rights
WSRW can today reveal a leaked EU document showing plans to continue trading with products from occupied Western Sahara, in direct violation of earlier rulings by the EU Court of Justice. A vote will take place this Wednesday.
On Wednesday 1 October, EU Member States will vote on a new trade agreement with Morocco that explicitly covers products from Western Sahara, yet without the consent of the Saharawi people. The European Commission has quietly negotiated this agreement, disregarding ten consecutive CJEU judgments affirming the Saharawis’ right to self-determination.
One year ago, on 4 October 2024, the CJEU annulled the application of the 2019 EU–Morocco trade deal to Western Sahara because the Saharawi people had not given their consent. The Court gave the EU a one-year deadline - until 4 October 2025 - to bring its actions into line with international law.
Instead of complying, the Commission has doubled down, re-negotiating the same type of agreement with Morocco while once again excluding the Saharawis.
Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW) has obtained a leaked copy of the Commission’s draft agreement with Morocco. Its explanatory memorandum reveals a cynical approach: professing to “respect international law” while structurally undermining it in practice.
The leaked files can be read further down in this article: one containing the proposed Council Decision, the other the proposed agreement itself.
Ten CJEU rulings leave no room for doubt: Western Sahara is “separate and distinct” from Morocco and only the Saharawi people can consent to agreements affecting their land and resources. The most recent rulings, of 4 October 2024, acknowledged that consent may, in limited cases, be ‘presumed’, but only under strict conditions: first, the agreement must not impose obligations on the people of the territory; and second, the people - including those displaced outside of the territory - must receive “specific, tangible, substantial, and verifiable benefits” proportional to the scale of the resource exploitation.
Yet the EU Commission now proposes business as usual - treating Morocco as if it had legal authority over Western Sahara and sidelining the Saharawi people entirely. As for “benefits”, the draft suggests channeling EU taxpayer money into infrastructure projects in the occupied territory that are high on Morocco’s economic wishlist, alongside an increase in EU humanitarian aid to the Saharawi refugee camps.
The timeline and speed behind the negotiations is deeply troubling. Check out this chronology:
- Wednesday 10th September, 13:00: EU Member states’ representatives meet in Brussels, granting the Commission a mandate to negotiate an amended version of its agreement with Morocco.
- Wednesday 10th September: that same afternoon: EU-Morocco negotiations begin.
- Monday 15th September - five days later - talks conclude and the draft agreement is initialled.
- Thursday 18th September: the European Commission adopts the proposals for Council decisions to sign and apply provisional application of the agreement and to conclude it.
- Friday 19th September: the European Commission’s proposals are submitted to the Council.
- Friday 26th September: vote in COREPER on the European Commission’s proposals is scheduled on 1 October.
WSRW considers it not credible that such a politically charged agreement - after a decade of defeats in EU courts - could be negotiated, finalised and initialled in just five days. The obvious question is whether the Commission had in fact already begun negotiations with Morocco before receiving a legal mandate.
Comparable negotiations have previously taken months to conclude. The result of the five-day negotiation is a document full of legal arguments that are incompatible with the ten CJEU rulings.
Another red flag occurs on 19 September, when the Commission suggests applying the new deal provisionally to avoid a disruption of trade. This effectively sidelines the European Parliament, as the deal would take immediate effect, without its approval - a process which normally takes weeks or even months.
On 26 September, the Council vote was announced for 1 October - leaving EU Member States an incredibly small window of scrutiny. This rushed approach bypasses democratic oversight and prevents full discussion of legality, consent, and human rights before the deal enters into force.
For the vote on the provisional application, as with the vote on the mandate, the Commission has chosen a written procedure, normally reserved for urgent matters. Combined with the five-day negotiation window, this choice underscores the rush to push the deal through Council rather than ensuring compliance with the Court’s rulings.
The Commission’s claim of urgency is not convincing. After the Court struck down the previous trade deal in December 2016, Western Sahara products entered the EU without preferential tariffs for more than two years and seven months until the new agreement took effect in July 2019 - a gap the Commission itself previously said did not justify provisional application.
The European Parliament has earlier called on the Commission “not to request provisional application of trade agreements, including trade chapters of association agreements, before Parliament gives its consent” recalling that “it would seriously undermine Parliament’s rights and create potential legal uncertainty vis-à-vis the agreement’s other signatory and the economic operators concerned”.
The Commission has also previously underlined that“ in line with past practices of EU Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), provisional application will only take place after the vote of consent in the European Parliament.”
The above screenshot, taken 29 September 2025, shows the EU Commission’s transparency registry, showing that the relevant documents are the only ones that are not published. Download that page here.
Download also an overview from Council’s website, accessed 29 Sept 2025, showing all the files listed as inaccessible to the public.
Most disturbing of all, the Saharawi people - recognised by both the UN and the CJEU as the rightful holders of self-determination - have once again been excluded entirely. Morocco, which has neither sovereignty nor administering authority over Western Sahara, is positioned as the EU’s sole partner: to negotiate, sign, implement, and monitor the deal. This perpetuates the EU’s long-standing practice of ignoring the very people whose rights the Court insists must be respected.
Instead of providing genuine “benefits” to the Saharawi people, the EU now proposes - among other measures - to finance Moroccan energy, irrigation and desalination infrastructure in the occupied territory. This risks opening a Pandora’s box of new controversies. A single such project - already slated for completion next year and partly owned by the Moroccan king - will trigger a surge of vegetable exports to the EU, expanding farmland in Western Sahara sixfold. In other words, in seeking to remedy the illegality of the previous agreement, the Commission is, ironically, planning to massively expand the very practices that the Court has already deemed to violate the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination.
“This document makes for utterly disturbing reading. The Commission has chosen to negotiate with Morocco in secret, shut out the Saharawis, and ram through a deal that tramples on self-determination. That is not rule of law - it’s complicity in its denial. We demand that EU institutions defend the most basic principles of international law and human rights, not shred them. The EU Member States must be given sufficient time to object when the Commission seeks to bypass these obligations”, says Sara Eyckmans of Western Sahara Resource Watch.
To read the content of the leaked document, see the annexes to the article here.
