By Zainab Calcuttawla
Rabat - The European Union has lodged an appeal against a ruling made by the European Court of Justice - the EU’s second highest court - which declared the union’s trade agreement with Morocco not applicable to the Western Sahara, in southern Morocco.
The European Council, consisting of the EU's 28 members, began the appeals process at the European Court of Justice last week. The process normally takes 18 months to complete.
Morocco signed an agriculture agreement with the European Union in March 2012. The agreement established reciprocal liberalization measures on agricultural products, processed agricultural products, and fish and fishery products. It lowered custom duties on European agricultural and fisheries products exported to Morocco by 55 percent while it reduced tariffs on the same Moroccan products by 70 percent over a 10-year period.
Later that year, the Algeria-backed Polisario Front lodged a complaint against the agriculture agreement based on the claim that the inhabitant of the Western Sahara do not benefit from it.
Last December, the European Court issued a ruling annulling part of the trade agreement.
The European Union “did not verify whether the exploitation of natural resources of the Western Sahara under Moroccan control was done or not for the benefit of the people of that territory,” the European Court said in its ruling issued on December 10, 2016.
In January, Morocco suspended contact with the EU delegation in Rabat because the country considered the ruling “a provocation.”
According to Eurostat data published earlier this month, Morocco was the biggest non-EU supplier of vegetables to Europe in 2015 in terms of both value and volume of products. From January to October of 2015 - the period before the partial annulment went into effect - Morocco exported 630 million Euros or 504,000 tons of vegetables to Europe.
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