By IPS Correspondents
CASABLANCA, Nov 12 2007 (IPS)

The months-long political impasse over death penalty abolition in Morocco can only be finally broken by King Mohamed VI, according to a leading rights campaigner.

"Abolition now depends directly on the king," Mostafa Hannaoui, a member of the Progress and Socialism Party, told IPS. Only the king had the authority to break the current deadlock and put the controversial subject back on the political agenda.

For months all political parties in Morocco have maintained a silence on the death penalty abolition issue, even during the recent national elections.

Three parties – the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP), the Progress and Socialism Party (PPS) and the Democratic Forces Front (FFD) – had promised to campaign for abolition in the elections held on September 7.

They had publicly pledged to do this at an international conference on the death penalty organised by the Paris-based World Coalition against the Death Penalty in Casablanca last year. This was widely reported at the time in the Moroccan and international press.

In February this year, the head of Morocco&#39s state-appointed consultative committee on human rights, Ben Zekri, told delegates at the Third World Congress against the Death Penalty in Paris that there was general agreement among MPs that the death penalty in Morocco should be abolished. This raised hopes that Morocco would become the first Arab country to abolish capital punishment.

Hannaoui said the parties could drop any mention of the death penalty issue from their election manifestos because of the "lack of internal party democracy". Party leaders decided their political agendas without needing to consider the opinions of the rank and file members, he said.

"There was an absence of any real debate when the party manifestoes were drawn up," he said.

IPS approached the USFP and FFD parties to confirm this explanation for the omission of the death penalty abolition issue from their election programmes, but they refused to comment.

Hannaoui said Morocco&#39s current stiff resistance to abolition was due to the recent "terrorist attacks against Morocco".

"These have made it difficult for the state to abolish the death penalty while innocent citizens are being killed," he said.

After a lull of four years and the deadly bombings in Casablanca in 2003, there was a new wave of bombings in the city, Morocco&#39s largest, this March and April.

Some five suicide bombers blew themselves up. A sixth was shot dead by the police and three others arrested. A police agent was shot dead in the action. Several innocent bystanders were injured in the blasts, according to press reports.

The first political fall-out of these bombings appears to have been in the evaporation of support for a private member&#39s bill to abolish the death penalty.

This was introduced last year by Bouchra Khiari, a MP from the FFD party.

"The bill was simply put into the freezer. It is still waiting for approval by the king and then the government," Mostafa Hannaoui said.

Hannaoui predicted that royal support for the bill to proceed might eventually be given.

The young king had shown his liberal, progressive side, he said.

He had agreed to set up the Equity and Reconciliation Board (IER), a symbolic move to make amends to the victims of human rights violations during the rule of his father, Hassan II.

Hassan II ruled from 1961 to 1999. During that time, known as "The Years of Lead", thousands of opponents were kidnapped and imprisoned. Some were executed without trial.

In 2005, the IER completed its work and issued its final report. One of its concluding recommendations was that the abolition of the death penalty was necessary to complete the reconciliation process.

Hannaoui noted that the King had also adopted a new progressive family law in 2002. This granted emancipation rights to women which were unprecedented in the Arab and Muslim world, including freedom to marry without paternal permission.

The king had also backed efforts to stamp out corruption. Several prominent officials had been put on trial and convicted of embezzlement of state funds in a series of trials, he said.

Human rights activists argue that the death penalty issue is the key to reversing the widespread public cynicism over the working of the electoral system in Morocco.

This was reflected in the extraordinarily low 37 percent turnout in the September elections. Nearly half of the votes cast then, some 17 percent, were declared invalid.

"Many human rights activists boycotted the elections. If death penalty abolition had been an issue, they would have certainly turned out to vote and the turnout would have been higher," Khalid Harakat, a member of the Moroccan Human Rights Association, told IPS.

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