Morocco must release journalist Ali Lmrabet and end two decades of judicial harassment

Read in Arabic / للقراءة بالعربية

Moroccan authorities detained journalist Ali Lmrabet on 12 July 2026 the moment he landed at Tangier's Ibn Battouta Airport, arriving from Barcelona, where he has lived in exile for years. He was held on the basis of an outstanding search warrant and transferred to the national judicial police brigade in Casablanca for questioning under the prosecutor's supervision. Skyline International for Human Rights calls on Morocco to release Lmrabet immediately and to stop what has become a two decade pattern of legal harassment against one of the country's best-known independent journalists.

Authorities have not publicly detailed the charges against him. Pro-government outlets in Morocco have since suggested the case involves defamation and false news complaints tied to specific individuals, framing it as a matter of ordinary law rather than press freedom. Lmrabet's own supporters and family read it differently as the latest chapter in a campaign against a journalist who has spent more than twenty years being punished for what he writes.

That history is well documented. Lmrabet was one of the defining voices of Moroccan journalism in the early years of King Mohammed VI's reign, editing the magazines Demain and Demain Magazine and later serving as editor in chief of Le Journal. He was arrested and imprisoned in 2003 over his reporting and opinions. In 2005, a Moroccan court banned him from practicing journalism inside the country for ten years, a sentence that pushed him into exile in Spain, where he has continued writing for outlets including the Spanish paper El Mundo.

A journalist who has already been jailed once and legally barred from his own profession for a decade does not need a new prosecution explained to him twice. Morocco knows exactly what message an airport arrest sends to a returning critic, and it knows exactly what message it sends to everyone still writing from inside the country.

This arrest also fits a pattern Skyline International for Human Rights has tracked closely in Morocco in recent years. Since 2022 alone, we have documented at least nine separate cases of activists, bloggers, and journalists prosecuted for peaceful expression, including repeated arrest and re-arrest of blogger Saida El Alami, the prosecution of human rights defender Fouad Abdelmoumni over a Facebook post referencing Pegasus spyware allegations, the five month prison sentence handed to activist Hassan Daoudi for Facebook posts calling for peaceful protests over the rising cost of living, and the mass arrests during the Gen Z 212 protests, which independent reporting put at more than 2,400 people detained amid the largest wave of unrest Morocco has seen since 2011.

One of those Gen Z 212 cases mirrors Lmrabet's arrest closely. Zeineb Kharroubi, a French Moroccan activist based in Paris, was detained the moment she landed at Marrakech airport in February 2026 while visiting family, with security forces seizing her phone and forcing access to her private data before she was held overnight without a lawyer present due to a bar association strike. She was later convicted and given a six month suspended sentence for social media posts related to the protests. The Moroccan Association for Human Rights called her case part of a wider trend of prosecuting young people for the peaceful exercise of their rights. Like Lmrabet, she was a critic living abroad who was seized the instant she set foot back in the country.

The specific names and charges change. The legal playbook, vague accusations of insult, defamation, incitement, or false news used to reach people whose real offense is criticism of the state, does not.

Morocco has pointed to reforms like its restructured National Press Council as evidence of a more open media environment, though human rights groups, including Article 19, called that same reform a serious setback for press freedom. An outstanding warrant waiting for a journalist the moment he steps off a plane is not what that openness looks like in practice.

The detention and underlying pattern raise serious concerns under Morocco's obligations as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, specifically the right to freedom of expression under Article 19 and the right to liberty and security of person under Article 9. A ten-year professional ban imposed on a journalist for his published work sits uneasily with those same obligations, regardless of the domestic legal label attached to it.

Skyline International for Human Rights calls on the Moroccan authorities to

• Release Ali Lmrabet immediately and disclose the specific charges against him.
• Ensure he has immediate access to legal counsel of his choosing and a fair, transparent process
• End the practice of using defamation and false news provisions to pursue journalists for critical reporting
• Guarantee Lmrabet's safety and freedom of movement, including his ability to return to Spain without further legal obstruction

Skyline also calls on international press freedom organizations and the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression to monitor Lmrabet's case closely and press Morocco for a transparent accounting of the charges against him.