News about the Western Sahara conflict have always been strongly sensured in Moroccan press. Moroccan editiorial boards and journalists who have written about Western Sahara, or who have reproduced foreign Western Sahara articles, have been punished with imprisonments, huge fines and prohibitions against writing.

Since 2005, the censorship has furthermore been targeted against foreign webpages. Among others, the webpages of several of the Support Committee's sister organisations in Europe and the USA hae been closed down for users in Western Sahara and Morocco. So has also pages such as www.blogspot.com and www.anonymizer.com, because they have been used to curcumvent the Moroccan internet and press censorship. This censorship has repeatedly been condemned by Reporters Without Borders. See for instance
www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15809.

It is therefore little probable that the Norwegian Support Committee's new homepages will be used by Sahrawi human rights activists living in occupied Western Sahara. if the Moroccan Ministry of Interior also closes the local access to www.vest-sahara.no, the Support Committee will have to look for new and creative ways to circumvent the censorship.

The Support Committee would like to thank the Trade Union for Industry and Energy who have financed the building of these homepages.