Morocco and Niger signed on Monday, August 1, 2022 in Rabat a declaration of intent to strengthen cooperation means between both countries in the fight against human trafficking.
In his statement on the occasion, Minister of Justice Mr. Abdellatif Ouahbi highlighted that Morocco has witnessed an outstanding national dynamism launched by His Majesty King Mohammed Vi to set up a broad national strategy in accordance with participative approach about migration, exile and human trafficking, which was crowned by an anti-human trafficking law in 2016n number 27.14.
According the Minister, a national committee was created to coordinate efforts of all players from government sectors, public institutions and civil society NGO’s to fight human trafficking considered as a crime and therefore dry its sources.
Minister Ouahbi considered that integrating the process of joining international bilateral and multilateral agreements is an important step that would contribute to halt criminal actions through reinforcing international cooperation at various levels, both civil and penal.
In this context, Minister Ouahbi said that the Ministry of Justice has signed many agreements of judiciary cooperation in the penal field and have reached about 79 agreements with different world’s countries, including European, American, African and Asian countries, in addition to Arab countries.
Minister of Justice pointed out that the national committee to coordinate measures against human trafficking , supervised by the Justice Ministry, remains open to all cooperation initiatives with the committee from the Republic of Niger.
From his side, Mr. Mumuni Hamidou, chairman of the national committee to coordinate fight against human trafficking in the Republic of Niger said that Morocco has accumulated an important experience in this field and has made tremendous efforts to fight criminality related to human trafficking in general and in human trafficking in particular; and this “will make us benefit from a lots of excellent practices in the context of cooperation among African countries to fight human trafficking”.
Mr. Hamidou made a statement to the press saying that the signing of this declaration of intent is highly important between Morocco and Niger to reinforce bilateral cooperation.