Strengthening research and training activities in the field of human rights with the University of Tifariti

Date: 2026 January 26

At the beginning of December 2025, the dean of the University of Tifariti, Moulay Emhamed Brahim, welcomed a delegation from the Hegoa Institute of the University of the Basque Country (EHU), led by its director, Irantzu Mendia Azkue, at the university’s headquarters in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. Tatiana Montenegro Garay and Gloria Guzmán Orellana also participated in the meeting as part of the technical team.

It provided an opportunity to renew bilateral relations between the two institutions, which were resumed in 2025 within the framework of a cooperation project funded by the Basque Government through the Directorate for Human Rights and Victim Support. It also served to reflect on the continuity of the collaboration between the two institutions, particularly in relation to scientific dissemination and research and training activities in the field of human rights.

Training

During the meeting, the actions carried out to date were reviewed and assessed, linked primarily to strengthening the University of Tifariti Research Centre (CIUT) and to disseminating the findings of Hegoa’s research into human rights violations against the Sahrawi population by the Moroccan occupying regime.

Among the training activities, two sessions given by Hegoa in July 2025 stand out: the first on communication and digital marketing for libraries and documentation centres and the second on alternative metrics for scientific evaluation. In addition, Abderrahman Taleb Omar, coordinator of CIUT and professor at the Public University of Navarre, delivered a presentation in October as part of an activity of the official master’s degree programmes of EHU and Hegoa, in which he highlighted the importance of research as a contribution to the counter-narrative that is being promoted about the situation of the Sahrawi people.

Publications

In December, the virtual seminar Memorias que resisten: investigación en derechos humanos en el Sáhara Occidental (Memories that Resist: Human Rights Research in Western Sahara) was held, with Professor Carlos Martín Beristain as the main speaker. During the session, the main findings of the report El Oasis de la Memoria: Memoria Histórica y Violaciones de Derechos Humanos en el Sáhara Occidental (Hegoa, Bilbao, 2012, two volumes) (The Oasis of Memory: Historical Memory and Human Rights Violations in Western Sahara), were presented, as well as the results of subsequent research carried out by Hegoa along the same lines. At this same seminar, the recent Arabic translation of the executive summary of El Oasis de la Memoria (The Oasis of Memory) was also presented.

The session was attended by prominent human rights defenders in occupied Western Sahara, including Alisalem Tamek, El Ghalia Djimi and Mohamed Elmoutaouakil, as well as Abdeslam Aomar Lahsen, president of the Association of Families of Sahrawi Prisoners and Disappeared Persons (AFAPREDESA). Researchers from the University of Tifariti, the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, the Chair of Middle Eastern and African Studies in Ecuador and the University of Seville, among other universities, also took part.

Furthermore, Hegoa contributed to the dissemination of the second issue of Tifariti magazine, which brings together political, legal, anthropological, historical and media analyses and perspectives through articles published in Arabic, Spanish and English.

More information: