'The Western Sahara is the last country in Africa that has not been correctly decolonised - instead, the right of the Sahrawi people to post-colonial independence has been frozen in time,' writes Konstantina Isidoros in introducing this special edition of Pambazuka News. 'If we are to take the rule of international law as our guiding foundation, then Morocco has blatantly defied international law twice, by its illegal invasion of someone else’s sovereign territory and by its illegal occupation that still continues today.'

As 36 imprisoned Saharawi activists continue a hunger strike from seven Moroccan jails, Konstantina Isidoros writes of the 'groundswell of international condemnation of Morocco's behaviour'. Protesting against Morocco's longstanding occupation of Western Sahara and the human rights abuses suffered by the indigenous Saharawi population, the hunger strikers' action represents the latest peaceful challenge to the Moroccan state's illegal claims on Western Sahara, stresses Isidoros, from individuals widely recognised as 'prisoners of conscience'.

Moroccan security agents abducted and tortured a 19 year-old Sahrawi woman on 27 August for being a human rights activist, Konstantina Isidoros tells Pambazuka News. Nguia El Haouassi’s ordeal is just ‘one of many episodes of Moroccan police brutality’ that occur every year’, says Isidoros, but thanks to ‘an increasing number of Sahrawi student-led internet blogs’, records of human rights abuses against Sahrawi in the Occupied Territories are breaking through Morocco’s ‘propaganda wall’ to reach a global audience.