A half-century-old diplomatic letter has resurfaced this week, reviving a debate Rabat has never considered closed: the legal status of Ceuta and Melilla. Newly cited United Nations archives show that Morocco formally requested the return of the Spanish-held enclaves as early as 1975, contradicting a narrative long pushed in parts of the Spanish press that the kingdom never lodged an official claim.
The document, catalogued as A/AC.109/475 and dated January 31, 1975, is a letter from Morocco’s then-ambassador to the UN, Driss Slaoui, addressed to the chairman of the Special Committee on Decolonization. In it, the diplomat flags the « continuation of colonial status » over several pockets of Moroccan territory, explicitly naming Ceuta, Melilla, the Peñón de Alhucemas, the Rock of Vélez de la Gomera, and the Chafarinas Islands as « the last remnants of colonial occupation on Africa’s Mediterranean coast. »
The letter’s language leaves little room for ambiguity. It states that the kingdom « has never abandoned its firm resolve to recover these enclaves, » grounding the claim in the April 27, 1956 agreement that ended the Spanish protectorate over Morocco, as well as in a 1961 speech by King Hassan II at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade, where he publicly denounced the continued Spanish presence on Moroccan soil.
Crucially, Rabat did not stop at rhetoric. The archive shows Morocco formally asked the Decolonization Committee to add the territories to the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories, invoking General Assembly Resolution 1514 on the independence of colonized peoples, a procedural step that, had it succeeded, would have placed Ceuta and Melilla on the same international track as other decolonization cases.
That the request went nowhere at the time does not erase its existence, analysts note. The 1960s and 1970s were an era in which former colonial powers still wielded outsized influence inside UN bodies, a balance of power that has shifted considerably since. What the document does settle, more than fifty years later, is the factual record: Morocco’s claim over the enclaves is not a recent invention or a talking point manufactured for domestic politics, but a position formally lodged with the United Nations decades ago.
As the enclaves remain a recurring flashpoint in Morocco-Spain relations, the resurfacing of this archival paper trail adds a documentary layer to a dispute that has, until now, largely played out in political statements rather than in the historical record.
