MOROCCO: KING SEEN AS FINAL ARBITER IN LONG-RUNNING DEBATE

the months-long political impasse over death penalty abolition in Morocco can only be finally broken by King Mohamed VI, according to a leading rights campaigner. "Abolition now depends directly on the king," Mostafa Hannaoui, a member of the Progress and Socialism Party, told IPS. Only the king had the authority to break the current deadlock and put the controversial subject back on the political agenda. For months all political parties in Morocco have maintained a silence on the death penalty abolition issue, even during the recent national elections. Three parties had promised to campaign for abolition in the elections held on September 7. They had publicly pledged to do this at an international conference on the death penalty organised by the Paris-based World Coalition against the Death Penalty in Casablanca last year. This was widely reported at the time in the Moroccan and international press. In February this year, the head of Morocco's state-appointed consultative committee on human rights, Ben Zekri, told delegates at the Third World Congress against the Death Penalty in Paris that there was general agreement among MPs that the death penalty in Morocco should be abolished. This raised hopes that Morocco would become the first Arab country to abolish capital punishment. But in the September elections no political party campaigned for abolition. Hannaoui said Morocco's current stiff resistance to abolition was due to the recent "terrorist attacks against Morocco". "These have made it difficult for the state to abolish the death penalty while innocent citizens are being killed," he said.