“Every year, Morocco responds to an average of nearly 80% of French consular pass (laissez-passer) requests,” emphasized Morocco’s ambassador to France, Samira Sitail, underscoring that “this is a truth that needs to be set straight.” according to French media.
This statement comes following “frequent accusations by French authorities against Morocco for not issuing enough consular permits to facilitate the repatriation of its nationals illegally residing in France.”
The same source cited a 2022 report from the French Senate in 2022 characterized “Morocco’s issuance of these permits as sporadic.”
The figure reported by the Moroccan Ambassador to France does not align with that provided by the French Interior Ministry, which disclosed that Morocco granted only 25% of France’s consular pass requests from January to July 2021.
France Info analyzed the figures within the podcast “Le Vrai ou Faux” and concluded that “both countries are discussing the same issue from different perspectives, leading to different conclusions.”
The same source explained that the French perspective only compares the number of consular pass requests sent to Morocco with the number actually issued, resulting in a Moroccan cooperation rate of 25% for the first half of 2021.
Morocco, however, “screened France’s requests before calculating its cooperation rate, with the Moroccan embassy’s press service noting that from 2018 to 2024, half of the identification requests received did not pertain to Moroccan nationals.”
It added that “only half of the French requests involved individuals whose Moroccan identity could be proven by Moroccan authorities. Therefore, Morocco calculates its cooperation rate based solely on this portion of the requests.”
Morocco’s rate includes permits that were issued but left uncollected due to incomplete files or because the passes were not picked up by the prefectures.
It added that the Moroccan embassy confirmed to Franceinfo that “from 2018 to 2024, the issuance rate of consular permits for identified Moroccans stands at 88.1%,” the same figure cited by Ambassador Samira Sitaïl.
Using France’s method, the same source noted that Morocco’s cooperation rate averages 34% from 2018 to 2024—closer to the French Interior Ministry’s data, though not directly comparable, as their 25% figure covers only early 2021.
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