A Painful Blow From The European Union To Morocco’s Expansionist Dreams

On Monday, July 17, 2023, the Fisheries Agreement signed between the Moroccan Makhzen regime and the European Union will come to an end, after four years of political controversy and legal conflict between Rabat and Brussels over the legality of this agreement, which was annulled by the European Court of Justice in a decision appealed by Rabat and Brussels.
Before this agreement expired, the European Union announced last June that it had no intention of opening new negotiations to extend it. Rather, statements by various European officials confirmed that they would not renew the agreement unless the European judiciary ruled on the appealed court decision. This ruling had declared the agreement illegal because it included the Sahrawi areas occupied by the Moroccan Makhzen regime, which the European judiciary considered to be outside the purview of Moroccan sovereignty.
The European Union used to start negotiations with the Kingdom of Morocco to renew the fisheries agreement months before the expiry of the contract, a situation that was not recorded this year.
Spain controls the majority of the ships that fish in the territorial waters of the occupied Sahrawi areas, together with Morocco, on the basis of the expired agreement, with 93 ships out of a total of 128 European ships, in exchange for about 52 million euros, a small amount that does not reflect the political controversy that accompanied the end of the agreement. This indicates that the Moroccan regime wanted the European Union to implicitly recognize its alleged sovereignty over the occupied Sahrawi areas and not to collect material compensation for the level of plundering of Moroccan territorial waters by European fishermen.
In September 2021, the Court of Justice of the European Union rescinded the agreement and ruled in favor of the Polisario Front as the sole and legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, since the agreement was concluded without the consent of the Sahrawi people. However, the European Council and the Commission appealed the decision in December of the same year in order to justify the continuation of the text of the expired agreement.
The Europeans acknowledged the impossibility of renewing the agreement before the European judiciary decides on the appeal expected before the end of this year. This year, by the European Court of Justice, which previously canceled trade and fisheries agreements between the European Union and Morocco in September 2021.
It is unfortunate for the Moroccan regime that relations between Rabat and Brussels are suffering from an unprecedented crisis of confidence, embodied in the latest condemnation of the Moroccan regime by the European Union last Thursday, against the background of its interference in the internal politics of EU member countries and its support for right-wing political parties, as happened in the recent legislative elections scandal. In Italy, this condemnation was met with suspicious silence by the Moroccan media.
This condemnation is added to many other condemnations against Rabat issued by Brussels during the current year, in a remarkable scene that confirms the collapse of trust between the Moroccan regime and its European allies, which it lost in a moment of arrogance after it felt the “tweet” of the former US president Donald Trump, which prompted the Makhzen regime towards the temptation of normalization with the Zionist entity that obviates the need for the Europeans, in the context of the political corruption scandal represented by the bribery of European deputies, in addition to the spying scandal on high officials in European countries, such as the French President Emmanuel Macron and the outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and many others.