Marrakech – October has once again emerged as a defining month in the long diplomatic history of Morocco’s Western Sahara dispute. On Thursday, the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted its annual resolution on the question by 152 votes in favor, including Morocco’s, against two and with seven abstentions.
The text, presented by the Senegalese chair of the Fourth Committee, is normally adopted without a vote under a consensus practice in place since 2006.
This year it went to a recorded ballot after a last-minute request from the United States delegation, which sought a vote on all 23 draft resolutions before the committee, none excepted, including those usually passed by consensus.
That move reflects a State Department orientation to demand recorded votes across all resolutions of the six Main Committees of the General Assembly, from security and disarmament to sustainable development, humanitarian and human rights questions, as well as legal and budget matters.
Lo que significa para Marruecos la nueva resolución de la Cuarta Comisión de la ONU sobre el Sáhara
Mientras que para Marruecos la votación en la Cuarta Comisión de Naciones Unidas constituye un no acontecimiento, algunas voces y cuentas afines a Argelia y al Polisario la…
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) October 15, 2026
Morocco voted for the text alongside 151 other member states, for several reasons. First, the resolution confirms Security Council Resolution 2797, which consecrated the Moroccan Autonomy Plan as the basis for settlement within Moroccan sovereignty. Second, it reaffirms the responsibility of the four parties – Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, and the separatist Polisario – to engage in good faith in the political process.
The reference carries particular weight. Resolution 2797 was adopted on October 31, 2025, after last year’s committee review, which means this is the first time the committee’s resolution could incorporate it.
Beyond that reference, the text is identical to those adopted over the past two decades and introduces nothing new. It supports the political process led by the Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy toward a realistic, pragmatic, lasting, and mutually acceptable solution, consistent with the Council’s relevant resolutions.
It also welcomes the parties’ commitment to enter, in good faith and without preconditions, a more intensive phase of negotiation, taking note of developments since 2006 – chiefly the adoption of 2797 and three rounds of talks in Washington and Madrid, where Morocco presented its developed autonomy proposal. The resolution does not prejudge the status of the Sahara, situating the question under Chapter VI of the UN Charter.
Hilale: From management to settlement
Two days earlier, Morocco’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Omar Hilale, told the same committee on Tuesday that 2797 marked a “major inflection” in the UN’s handling of the file, “moving from the logic of its management to that of its settlement.”
He described the resolution as “an irreversible tipping point” that consecrated the Autonomy Initiative as “the sole basis” for resolving the dispute and, for the first time, placed autonomy “within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.”
Hilale noted that 2797 reaffirmed the responsibility of the four parties and allowed direct discussions among them over three meetings in Washington and Madrid, co-chaired by the Personal Envoy and the US permanent representative.
The autonomy Morocco detailed there “reconciles political realism, democratic governance, and the aspirations of the populations,” Hilale argued, adding that the moment “requires each party to assume its historic responsibility,” with commitments honored and the cease-fire restored and observed.
The ambassador then moved to correct what he called historical and legal distortions circulating in recent weeks. He recalled that the decolonization of the Sahara was “definitively sealed half a century ago” through the Green March and the Madrid Accord, and that self-determination doctrine is not confined to Resolution 1514, having been completed by resolutions 1541 and 2625.
The Security Council has “definitively buried any idea of a referendum a quarter of a century ago,” he maintained.
Hilale reserved his sharpest language for the separatist group’s claim to speak for the camps’ residents, calling it “a shameful usurpation of their political rights.” The real representatives of the Sahara, he contended, are those “democratically elected,” as in the legislative elections held on September 23.
He also pressed the human dimension, noting that behind each resolution “there are women, men, and young people waiting in the Tindouf camps.” The purely humanitarian management of what he called the world’s second-longest refugee crisis, he warned, “cannot continue for another half century.”
Geneva: A parallel push on Tindouf
That concern framed Morocco’s parallel push in Geneva. On the same day as Hilale’s address, at the 77th session of the UNHCR Executive Committee, Morocco’s permanent representative Omar Zniber called on the agency and donor states to refocus on durable solutions for the Tindouf populations – voluntary repatriation, integration in the host country, or resettlement in a third country, based on free choice, and to work toward the camps’ dismantling.
“The world can no longer tolerate refugee situations that drag on for several decades,” he said, warning that such crises produce “unacceptable human conditions” and condemn entire generations to live “in a state of waiting, without horizon.”
He pointed to Tindouf, where, “despite billions of dollars spent,” the camps still show the most alarming rates of malnutrition, vulnerability, and diversion of aid, as documented by UN and UNHCR reports – a situation he described as “political instrumentalization with no link to the humanitarian aims of the UNHCR.”
The appeal drew broad support from committee members, a significant number of whom backed it in writing, while most major donor states said they stood ready to finance the implementation of these solutions. “Assistance must not finance the permanence of refugee status but the solutions it brings,” he concluded.
Zniber pointed to the camps entering their sixth decade, which makes them the oldest situation before the UNHCR, and recalled that High Commissioner Barham Salih had alerted the Security Council on September 25 to deteriorating conditions he called “untenable, unsustainable, and deeply inhumane.”
He cited a September 2 letter to the parties urging durable solutions without delay, along with King Mohammed VI’s appeal to the camps’ residents to seize “this historic opportunity” to return to their own.
Thursday, a group of states led by the United States and France widened that message. In a statement delivered by US ambassador Todd Steggerda, the group urged the UNHCR and donors to inform the camps’ populations of the “durable solution options” now available in light of 2797, and to prepare the conditions for “a more dignified future.”
Hilale, for his part, tied the momentum to a wider horizon. He recalled King Mohammed VI’s October 31 speech and its commitment to reviving the Arab Maghreb Union on the basis of mutual respect and cooperation among its five member states, part of an ambition for a more connected Atlantic-African space and a more stable Africa.
