A Civil Platform for Rights, Justice & Accountability
The Sahrawi NGO Alliance is a non-profit, independent civil platform dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights. Its membership includes the African Organization for Human Rights Monitoring (Africa Watch), the organization Defenders for Human Rights, and the International Network for Human Rights and Development.
"The protection and promotion of human rights cannot be achieved through the use of force, but by demanding rights through peaceful means."
The Alliance seeks to establish best practices in monitoring and documenting gross human rights violations in the MENA region, contributing to the broader promotion and dissemination of a human rights culture and supporting governmental, institutional, and civil society actors in adopting strategies capable of strengthening protection, prevention, and ensuring effective remedies.
Composed of dozens of experts, defenders, civil activists, and volunteers in international human rights law and humanitarian law from various nationalities across the MENA region, the Alliance focuses particular attention on protecting vulnerable groups — women, children, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless persons — in contexts of both peace and armed conflict.
In alignment with its founding orientation, the Sahrawi NGO Alliance was established on November 19, 2021, as a civil body independent of governments to collect information, monitor, and document events in the MENA region related to human rights.
It investigates human rights violations and engages regarding them with UN protection mechanisms, the media, commissions of inquiry, and relevant judicial bodies.
The Alliance has adopted monitoring, documentation, and the preparation of thematic and country reports, memoranda, complaints, letters, and statements addressed to the media regarding issues of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, torture, arbitrary detention, and groups such as refugee women and children, asylum seekers, migrants, stateless persons, human rights defenders, and persons with disabilities.
It assists UN mechanisms in understanding the depth of violations and providing recommendations thereon, and participates in drafting general comments on specific topics and ways to achieve justice for victims and combat impunity — as a methodology for serious work on thematic and country issues concerning the improvement of the status of rights and freedoms in the region.
Operating across North Africa and the Middle East, with particular attention to contexts of severe restriction — including Algeria and the Sahrawi camps in Tindouf, where the double burden of violations is most acute.
To collect, monitor, and document events in the MENA region; engage with UN protection mechanisms, media, commissions of inquiry, and judicial bodies; and advocate for victims of gross human rights violations.