The Casablanca Court of Appeal has decided on the provisional release of the nine detainees belonging to the Movement of 20 February, which is calling for political and social reforms. Arrested during a peaceful trade-union march on 6 April, the young demonstrators had been sentenced to between four months and one year in prison with no possibility of remission at the end of a trial marred by irregularities and were being held in Okasha prison. An FIDH international mission, led by its president, Karim Lahidji, was in Morocco at the beginning of June 2014 to investigate arbitrary detention, the practice of torture and prison conditions. On that occasion the FIDH had denounced to the authorities the procedural irregularities in the case and called for the detainees to be released provisionally.
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