(AI Translated) Ibrahim al-Ismaʿili, born in 1970, is a Sahrawi human‑rights defender and the head of the Sahrawi Center for the Preservation of Collective Memory. His human‑rights and political activism has been repeatedly linked to his arrests and political detentions. His experience of political imprisonment dates back to 1987, when he was abducted and held for several months in a secret detention center, amid the widespread waves of arrests and forced disappearances of Sahrawis in Western Sahara because of their political positions and human‑rights demands.

On 9 November 2010, Ibrahim al‑Ismaʿili was arrested again from his home in the Zamlah neighbourhood of the occupied city of Laayoune, in the presence of his wife and two of their four children, before being transferred to the Al‑Akhal prison in Laayoune. Seven months later, on 13 May 2011, he was released together with a number of other Sahrawi detainees, but his release lasted only moments, as the Moroccan occupation forces re‑arrested him directly in front of the prison gate and took him to the prison in Salé, about 1,200 km north of Laayoune, the capital of the “exiled” Sahara. This arrest marked a new stage in his judicial process, culminating in the Court of Appeal in Salé issuing, in 2017, a sentence of life imprisonment against him.

The Sahrawi political prisoner Ibrahim al‑Ismaʿili asserts that the confessions and statements on which his conviction was based were signed under torture and coercion, and he categorically denies ever having been in the Akrim Ezik camp at the time of its dismantling, which is a key element of his challenge to the charges against him. His case falls, in this context, within the pattern of Sahrawi human‑rights defenders who have been arrested and tried because of their political and human‑rights activism, accompanied by mistreatment, torture, and the extraction of forced confessions.