Sahrawi women display Sahrawi flags during a demonstration on 18 June 2021 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Isabel Infantes/Getty Images)
The United Nations, supposedly created to defend the right of peoples to self-determination, has once again demonstrated its double standards. While proclaiming the principles of freedom, sovereignty, and national dignity in its speeches, in practice it condones—through its complicit silence—the illegal occupation of Western Sahara by the Kingdom of Morocco.
With what moral authority can the UN speak of human rights when it denies an entire people their independence? The Sahrawi people have been waiting for almost half a century for the fulfillment of a promise: the referendum on self-determination. A referendum that the UN itself approved, but which it has never had the courage to demand Morocco allow. Instead, Western powers, guided by geostrategic and economic interests, have shielded the occupation with ambiguous resolutions and empty rhetoric.
The case of Western Sahara joins a long list of betrayed causes: Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Cuba, and so many other nations subjected to the double standards of the international system. While some peoples are invaded or blockaded under the pretext of “democracy,” others are abandoned so as not to upset the powerful.
The Sahrawi people resist with dignity in exile, in the Tindouf camps, and in their own occupied land, where Morocco imposes repression and plunders natural resources. The UN, by remaining silent, becomes complicit in this colonial crime.
From the Palestinian Union of Latin America (UPAL), we denounce this global hypocrisy and reaffirm our commitment to the independence of Western Sahara, to its people, and to its legitimate representative, the Polisario Front. There can be no selective justice or conditional self-determination.
The rights of peoples are not negotiable or postponed: the Sahara is and will be the Sahrawi people’s.
Palestinian Union of Latin America — UPAL
November 2, 2025
