On the International Day of Democracy, the Sahrawi NGOs Alliance denounces the persistent absence, in the Tindouf camps, of the foundational attributes of democratic governance and legal personhood.
It contends that Algeria, as the sovereign and internationally accountable host state, has effectively delegated authority over the camps' population to the Polisario Front, creating a legally unsupervised enclave shielded from international humanitarian and human-rights scrutiny.
The Alliance characterizes the fifty-year denial of an independent census and documented legal identity to camp residents not as administrative oversight but as a continuing violation of their civil existence, compounded by a one-party political structure that forecloses pluralism, free elections, and institutional accountability.
The statement further documents restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and movement, including the arrest of activists and bloggers in contravention of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, alongside the instrumentalization of humanitarian aid and the erosion of individual agency over questions of return, integration, or resettlement.
On this basis, the Alliance issues five demands: an internationally supervised independent census; the opening of political and civil pluralism through free elections; an end to arbitrary detention of dissenters; transparent, accountable governance of humanitarian assistance; and the unimpeded exercise of individual choice regarding one's future.
It calls on the United Nations and the international community to treat this file with the urgency commensurate with the universal human-rights principles it invokes.