Spain and Morocco to hold their next High-Level meeting in Madrid on December 3 and 4

Eduardo González The next High-Level Meeting (HLM) between Spain and Morocco will take place on December 3 and 4 in Madrid, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Thursday, November 27. “Within the current framework of the excellent bilateral relations between Spain and Morocco, both governments have decided to hold the 13th High-Level Meeting on December 4 in Madrid, preceded by a business meeting between the two countries on December 3 in the Spanish capital,” explained the department headed by José Manuel Albares in a statement. The previous HLM between Spain and Morocco was held on February 1 and 2, 2023, in Rabat. That summit began amid controversy due to Mohammed VI's snub of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and concluded with a Joint Declaration in which both parties expressed their desire to "enrich" the "excellent relations that have always united them," reiterated their "commitment to human rights," and pledged to "promote trade and investment." Furthermore, the two countries reached a "commitment to mutual respect" whereby both their discourse and political practice will "avoid anything that we know offends the other party, especially as it affects our respective spheres of sovereignty," an obvious reference to Ceuta and Melilla, on the one hand, and Western Sahara, on the other. The 2023 High-Level Meeting was attended by the Socialist members of the government and was marked by the absence of the ministers from Unidas Podemos, the junior partner in the coalition government, which has repeatedly criticized Pedro Sánchez's decision to recognize Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara. The 2023 Higher Regional Meeting (HRM) was the first since June 2015. Initially, a summit had been scheduled for December 2020, but it was subsequently postponed several times due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the profound diplomatic crisis that erupted in April 2021 following Spain's decision to admit Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali to a hospital in Logroño for humanitarian reasons. The turning point came in March 2022, with the Spanish government's decision to accept Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara as "the most serious and realistic basis" for resolving the conflict. As a consequence of this "thaw" (one of whose effects was the serious diplomatic crisis with Algeria, Spain's main gas supplier), President Pedro Sánchez and King Mohammed VI adopted a bilateral roadmap on April 7 in Rabat, laying the groundwork for the restoration of diplomatic relations and paving the way for the High-Level Meeting. Since that High-Level Meeting in February 2023, the most significant development has been the somewhat rushed resumption of the official flow of goods from Melilla and Ceuta into Morocco. The reopening of customs was one of the key points of the bilateral roadmap of April 7, 2022. After conducting three pilot tests throughout 2023, Spain and Morocco reached an agreement for the first goods crossing to take place on January 8, but the process was delayed due to some "technical problems."

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