{"id":4661,"date":"2026-08-13T15:29:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T15:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/?p=4661"},"modified":"2026-08-13T15:29:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T15:29:34","slug":"the-family-and-the-state-decide-ouahbi-opens-the-most-sensitive-question-over-ceutas-minors-where-is-the-families-consent-and-who-authorized-morocco-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/the-family-and-the-state-decide-ouahbi-opens-the-most-sensitive-question-over-ceutas-minors-where-is-the-families-consent-and-who-authorized-morocco-to\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Family and the State Decide\u201d: Ouahbi Opens the Most Sensitive Question over Ceuta\u2019s Minors \u2014 Where Is the Families\u2019 Consent, and Who Authorized Morocco to Bring Them Back?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">Moroccan Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi made a statement during his interview with Sky News Arabia that might initially appear to be no more than one element in his explanation of the legal complexity surrounding Moroccan minors currently in Ceuta. Yet, beneath the surface, it opens a political and legal question that goes well beyond the dispute over their return. Asked why Morocco has still been unable to bring these minors back, the minister explained that the process could not be treated so simply: the authorities first had to establish the minor\u2019s identity, identify the family, and determine where that family was located before proceeding with the necessary steps. He then made a particularly revealing statement: \u201cWhen the family and the state decide, we decide.\u201d The family therefore enters the minister\u2019s account, quite explicitly, as one of the elements preceding a decision on the child\u2019s return.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">This is not simply a matter of interpreting one isolated phrase. The Moroccan-Spanish agreement signed in Rabat on 6 March 2007 concerning unaccompanied minors, which entered into force in 2012, provides for cooperation aimed at protecting these children and facilitating their return to their families or, where appropriate, to a care institution in the country of origin. It also establishes procedures for identifying the minor, the family and the nationality, while providing that the two parties should agree in advance on the cases that may be subject to return and on the number of minors concerned. The return mechanism is therefore not designed as an automatic collective handover. It requires identification of the individual, clarification of the family situation and coordination between the two authorities regarding the cases concerned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">But Ouahbi\u2019s statement raises a question that political declarations alone cannot answer: if the family is, in the minister\u2019s own formulation, part of the decision, where are these families in the current case? Are there identified Moroccan families that have formally requested the return of their children from Ceuta? Have those families submitted official requests to the Moroccan authorities? Have they expressly authorized the Moroccan state to represent them in seeking their children\u2019s return from Spain? Or is the state acting in its capacity as the country of origin, responsible for protecting its nationals, regardless of whether an individual request has been submitted by the family?<\/p>\n<div class=\"xb57i2i x1q594ok x5lxg6s x78zum5 xdt5ytf x6ikm8r x1ja2u2z x1pq812k x1rohswg xfk6m8 x1yqm8si xjx87ck xx8ngbg xwo3gff x1n2onr6 x1oyok0e x1odjw0f x1iyjqo2 xy5w88m\">\n<div class=\"x78zum5 xdt5ytf x1iyjqo2 x1n2onr6 xaci4zi x129vozr\">\n<div class=\"html-div xdj266r x14z9mp xat24cr x1lziwak xexx8yu xyri2b x18d9i69 x1c1uobl x78zum5 xdt5ytf x1iyjqo2 x7ywyr2\">\n<div class=\"x1n2onr6 x1ja2u2z x9f619 x78zum5 xdt5ytf x2lah0s x193iq5w xyamay9\">\n<div class=\"x9f619 x1n2onr6 x1ja2u2z x78zum5 xdt5ytf x1iyjqo2 x2lwn1j\">\n<div class=\"x9f619 x1n2onr6 x1ja2u2z x78zum5 xdt5ytf x2lah0s x193iq5w xf7dkkf xv54qhq x1k70j0n xzueoph xzboxd6 x14l7nz5\">\n<div class=\"x6s0dn4 xal61yo x1obq294 x5a5i1n xde0f50 x15x8krk x78zum5 xdt5ytf x6ikm8r x10wlt62 x1n2onr6 xh8yej3\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"xl1xv1r\" src=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/video.php?height=335&amp;href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Freel%2F883693554541183%2F&amp;show_text=false&amp;width=560&amp;t=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"335\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">That distinction matters because the family and the state are not the same legal actor. The state can act in the name of its national interests and for the protection of its citizens, while the family has a direct relationship with the child and a parental responsibility that cannot be reduced to a social-media post or a video appeal. The question of \u201cfamily consent\u201d should therefore not be turned into an accusation or a ready-made conclusion. It should become a documentary question: are there formal family files? Are there specific requests concerning identified minors and their families? Have those requests been registered with a Moroccan authority? And have they subsequently been transmitted to the Spanish side through the procedure established by the bilateral agreement?<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">The issue becomes even more significant because the minors in Ceuta do not constitute a legally homogeneous group. Spanish authorities are dealing with unaccompanied minors whose individual and family circumstances may differ, while recent figures indicate that around 1,100 unaccompanied minors remained in Ceuta following the latest wave of arrivals. Madrid has maintained that their situations must be assessed individually and that their transfer to mainland Spain is being considered, while Rabat has expressed its willingness to cooperate on their return.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">This is where the apparent contradiction in Ouahbi\u2019s remarks becomes particularly significant. Morocco says it is ready to receive its children, while the minister rejects treating them as criminals or simply as migrants in an irregular situation, describing them instead as victims of networks that lure, incite and manipulate them. But being ready to receive them is one thing; making their return legally executable is another. The Moroccan-Spanish agreement itself requires the identification of the minor and the family and provides for coordination between the two authorities before the return can take place.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">The real difficulty, therefore, does not lie only at the border. It lies inside the administrative and legal file of each individual child. Who is the child? Who are the parents? Where is the family? Is it in Morocco or in Spain? Does the family actually want the child returned? And, above all, would that return serve the child\u2019s best interests? Only then does the question of who decides arise: the Moroccan state, the Spanish authorities, the courts or the institutions responsible for child protection. This sequence explains why Morocco\u2019s political willingness to receive its nationals cannot, by itself, produce an immediate collective return operation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">There is, however, another and more sensitive issue concerning the appeals that have appeared on social media. If Moroccan families have indeed appeared publicly demanding the return of their children, those appeals clearly carry human and political weight. But they do not, by themselves, establish that the state has received a legal mandate to act on their behalf. The next step is to move from the image to the document: Who is the family? Has its relationship with the minor been established? Has an official request been submitted? Has that request been registered by a Moroccan authority? Has it been transmitted to the Spanish side through the procedure provided for under the agreement?<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">The reverse is equally important. If there are no individual family requests, that does not mean the Moroccan state has no right to act. But it would then have to clarify the capacity in which it is acting. Is it demanding the return of Moroccan nationals? Is it invoking the implementation of a bilateral agreement? Is it acting on the basis of its responsibility for protecting minors? Or is it exercising all of these functions simultaneously? This clarification is not an administrative formality. The legal capacity in which Rabat acts determines the nature of the request it can place before Madrid.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">Ouahbi\u2019s own remarks suggest that the Moroccan government is aware of this complexity. He does not present the return of the children as a simple transfer at the border. Instead, he describes a sequence beginning with the identification of the minor and the family, followed by coordination between the two states and an assessment of the conditions under which the return can take place. In principle, this corresponds to the logic of the bilateral agreement, which places the protection of the minor and institutional cooperation at the heart of the process.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">The danger is that this legal complexity can become a political grey zone. Madrid can argue that Spanish law and the guarantees afforded to minors prevent collective returns; Rabat can respond that it is ready to receive them; and between these two positions, the child remains at the centre of a process in which responsibility can become dispersed. Spanish courts have already stressed that the agreement with Morocco cannot override the guarantees imposed by Spanish law and children\u2019s rights, reinforcing the need for an individual assessment of each case.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">This is why the question that should now move from public statements to the negotiating table is deceptively simple: <strong>if Morocco wants its children back, where are their files? And if the families want their children back, where are their requests? And if the state is speaking on behalf of those families, where is the legal basis establishing that representation?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">That question does not cast doubt on the families\u2019 desire to recover their children. Nor does it challenge Morocco\u2019s right to protect its nationals, and it certainly does not provide Spain with an argument for evading its own responsibilities toward the children. On the contrary, it places both states before the same demand for clarity: a child is not a number in a border crisis, a family is not a footnote in a political statement, and a state cannot simply declare that it is ready to receive its nationals if, in order to make that return effective, it must also provide sufficiently clear individual files for the other side to take legally enforceable decisions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"isSelectedEnd\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">Ultimately, the most revealing sentence in Ouahbi\u2019s interview may not be his reference to \u201cfriendship\u201d between Morocco and Spain, his warnings about trafficking networks, or even his rejection of the idea that Morocco should become a detention or transfer centre for migrants. It is the phrase in which he places \u201cthe family and the state\u201d before the decision. Because that phrase shifts the centre of the debate. The question is no longer simply: <strong>\u201cWhy is Madrid not returning the children?\u201d<\/strong> It becomes: <strong>who is requesting their return, on whose behalf, on the basis of which file, and with what guarantees that returning the child to that family is indeed the decision that serves the child\u2019s best interests?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Only then can the issue of the minors move beyond a political confrontation between Rabat and Madrid and become what it should be: a transparent, verifiable and accountable case, document by document, family by family and, above all, child by child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Moroccan Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi made a statement during his interview with Sky News Arabia that might initially appear to be no more than one element in his explanation of the legal complexity surrounding Moroccan minors currently in Ceuta. Yet, beneath the surface, it opens a political and legal question that goes well beyond the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,43,42,41,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-africa","category-asia-americas","category-europe-russia","category-middle-east","category-the-maghreb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4663,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661\/revisions\/4663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}