Marrakech – The United Nations Security Council is to vote this Friday, October 30, at 7 p.m. Moroccan time on a new resolution on the Western Sahara that drives Morocco’s Autonomy Plan to the center of any settlement and, for the first time, treats it as the only basis for negotiation.
According to the draft obtained in New York, Morocco preserves the essential of its gains despite concessions wrung from the initial American text. One unprecedented provision could upend the separatist front’s position altogether.
The text emerged from ten days of tense negotiations. It departs on several points from the “draft zero” that the United States circulated on October 20. That first version was deliberately maximalist, a negotiating floor built to retain the largest possible gains by the time of the vote. Even so, the outcome was always unlikely to fall below the 2025 resolution, 2797, a text already heavily favorable to Rabat.
On that score, the comparison is decisive. The draft keeps a political process that places the Moroccan Autonomy Plan, in its newly expanded version, at the heart of the talks. More than that, it makes the plan the sole basis. The preamble affirms that “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the most feasible solution,” and the text welcomes US President Donald Trump’s call to use the proposal as “the only framework” for a mutually acceptable outcome.
Paragraphs 5, 7 and 8 reinforce the point, calling on the parties to engage “using Morocco’s Autonomy Proposal as the only basis for negotiation.” The semantic shift was eased by the ground autonomy had already gained, a trend the Secretary-General, António Guterres, recorded in his report of October 1.
The preamble also notes the support of a growing number of member states. The three rounds held in Washington and Madrid between Morocco, the Polisario, Algeria and Mauritania, under Personal Envoy Staffan de Mistura, took that same proposal as their starting point.
Referendum dropped, mission turned political
The draft closes a 35-year chapter as well. The mission loses its reference to the referendum that Algeria and the Polisario have long sought to impose. From November 1, 2026, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara becomes, simply, the United Nations Mission in Western Sahara – MINUSO in place of MINURSO.
Its mandate runs to October 31, 2027, and its vocation turns political. The Secretary-General is to propose, by January 30, 2027, a leaner structure, including a cut in authorized uniformed personnel and the closure or consolidation of team sites.
A second blow lands at paragraph 6. The Council requests the Personal Envoy to consult “a broad range of Sahrawi constituencies and interlocutors,” including voices outside the negotiating parties, in the territory, in the refugee camps and across the diaspora.
The provision strips away the fiction the Polisario has maintained since its creation in May 1973, that it alone speaks for the so-called Sahrawi people. It opens the field to rival forces, among them the Sahrawi Movement for Peace (MSP) led by Hach Ahmed, a former separatist diplomat now aligned with autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, and to the unionist Sahrawis who form the majority on the ground and already sit in Moroccan national and local institutions.
The draft reaches into the Tindouf camps directly. For the first time, it asks the UN refugee agency to “complete the registration of the refugee population in the Tindouf area within six months.” It records deep concern over the protracted displacement and deteriorating conditions there, a situation it judges cannot responsibly be sustained, and ties continued funding to voluntary, durable solutions under UNHCR supervision.
The preamble condemns, in the same vein, the attack of May 5, 2026, on the town of Es-Smara.
A calculated, incremental tightening
Changes in Security Council language never arrive overnight. They move through incremental steps, built over years and sometimes decades. Since 2007, the Council’s wording on the Sahara has shifted steadily toward the Moroccan position, as competing powers advanced by stages against Algeria’s persistent resistance.
Moroccan author and political analyst Samir Bennis reads the new text as another deliberate step. The language is clearer, more explicit and more assertive than a year ago, he argues, signaling that the Autonomy Plan is now the sole basis and the only road to a definitive settlement. Washington, in his assessment, conceded on form and softened the first draft to secure consensus, yet obtained the substance it wanted from the outset.
The clearest marker of that shift is a single article. Where resolution 2797 held that genuine autonomy “could” constitute a solution, the new draft swaps the indefinite “a” for the definite “the,” affirming autonomy as the most feasible solution and closing, in the Council’s eyes, the debate over the plan’s relevance. That wording excludes every rival option, including the referendum abandoned since 2003.
For Algeria and the Polisario, Bennis contends, the text is a grim signal, as it is for the handful of states still clinging to an alternative reality. The consultation clause, he notes, is a particular setback for Algiers, which since the late 1970s leveraged petrodollars and third-world influence to impose the narrative that the Polisario is the sole legitimate representative of the Sahrawis. That claim now erodes.
The census carries the sharpest edge. It places Algeria under a legal obligation to open the camps and permit a count that would finally establish who among the Tindouf population is genuinely Sahrawi.
The fixed six-month deadline, in this reading, shows that the American drafters intend to accelerate the process and press Algiers and the Polisario to negotiate in good faith. Algeria has resisted such a count for decades and exploited the ambiguity over the camps’ true numbers. The provision could prove a rupture for its entire separatist project in Morocco’s south.
Russia’s expected abstention, Bennis argues, should not be read as hostility toward Morocco but as a diplomatic opening toward Rabat. Had Moscow intended to block the consensus forming around the Autonomy Plan, it could have done so in 2007, in 2018, or last year with resolution 2797. It did not.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, answering an Algerian journalist last October, noted that Morocco does not reject self-determination but views it as achievable through its autonomy proposal, and that Russia stands ready to accept any solution the parties agree on – the very approach, in his words, that the resolution now codifies.
The ballot is scheduled for 7 p.m. Moroccan time. Whatever the final margin, the draft on the table carries the Autonomy Plan further than any text before it, and narrows what little remains of the separatist thesis.
