Mohammed Ziane


Mohammed Ziane is a Moroccan politician and lawyer. He's has served as the National Coordinator of the Moroccan Liberal Party, a political formation he founded in 2002. He was previously an MP for the Constitutional Party in the 1980s but left that party in 1995. Ziane was briefly Minister-delegate of human rights in 1996, where he was the first and only Moroccan government to resign during his tenure.

Political activity

Ziane has been an outspoken critic of the Moroccan government in the recent years, and a regular contributor to public debate about current affairs in the media, as he has espoused by many hot issues such as the murder of fish monger Mohcine Fikri, crashed by the Municipal garbage lorry, and the arrest of activist Nasser Zefzafi.

As a lawyer

Ziane was involved in a number of high-profile cases, including the defense of army mutineers of the 1971 failed coup attempts, as well as a number of cases involving the Moroccan state in the 1990s, in particular one against trade-unionist Nubir al-Amawi. More recently, Ziane was the lawyer of the Moroccan intelligence service in a defamation case against journalist Aboubakr Jamai in 2007. In late May 2017, after the arrest of Nasser Zefzafi and about a hundred other activists in the Rif, he joined their defence team.

Personal life

Ziane was born in Southern Andalucia, the son of an affluent Riffian merchant and a Spanish lady, and spent the first years of his life in Málaga, before settling with his father in Tangiers during the mid 1950s, where he was raised by his paternal grandmother. Ziane has declared that his grandfather was the cousin of Abdelkrim al-Khattabi, and stressed his belonging to the Beni Ouryaghel Rifian tribe.
In several interviews Ziane revealed that he married several times and has had 7 male sons, in addition to adopting 8 others from his various other unions. One of his former wives is the daughter of Hassan II's senior advisor Ahmed Reda Guedira.