French Foreign Minister Heads to Morocco for Women’s Peace Forum in Essaouira
By Google News Category Diplomacy ·
Marrakech - France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, will travel to Morocco at the end of this week for a bilateral visit and to take part in the World Women’s Forum for Peace, the French foreign ministry announced at its November 5 press briefing in Paris.
According to the ministry’s spokesperson, Barrot will make the trip after the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris and the Paris Peace Forum. The visit pairs bilateral engagement with an appearance at the Essaouira gathering, where he is scheduled to join a ministerial panel.
The panel is set for Friday, November 13 at Dar Souiri, and it will bring Barrot together with Nasser Bourita, Morocco’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The two ministers are scheduled for an official session dedicated to crossing diplomacy and civil society in the work of building peace. The forum itself runs from November 12 to 14 in Essaouira.
Now in its third edition, it is organized by the association Les Guerrières de la Paix, which was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. The event gathers activists, political figures, diplomats and civil society representatives from around the world around the role of women in peacebuilding. Over three days, the program features round tables, debates, testimonies and artistic performances.
Topics include feminist diplomacy, the role of new technologies in conflict, culture as a vehicle for peace, and youth engagement. Organizers have also built in sessions on intergenerational and intercultural dialogue, and on the place of women in political and diplomatic decision-making. The Israeli-Palestinian question runs through much of the program.
The forum opens at Bayt Dakira, a site tied to dialogue between cultures, with a welcome from Les Guerrières de la Paix and remarks by André Azoulay, adviser to King Mohammed VI, and Tarik Ottmani, mayor of Essaouira. The ceremony pairs songs in Arabic and Hebrew with a peace testimony carried by a delegation from the Abu Gosh municipality.
A Friday civil society panel on keeping alive the prospect of a two-State solution brings together the Palestinian peace activists Ali Abu Awwad and Amal Abed with the Israeli peace activists Maya Savir and Yonathan Hefetz. The final day features a screening of the documentary “Résister pour la Paix,” by Hanna Assouline and Sonia Terrab, followed by an exchange with activists from both sides.
The forum’s stated ambition is to create the first international network of women peace activists. It extends the launch of the International Alliance of Women for Peace and reaffirms UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. Organizers want to give greater resonance to the voices of women working on the ground, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
Barrot’s trip marks the first visit by France’s top diplomat to Morocco since the UN Security Council failed on October 30 to renew the mandate of MINURSO, the peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara. Russia vetoed a draft resolution written by the United States, blocking its adoption, then moved a competing text to a hasty vote.
France’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Jérôme Bonnafont, used the session to restate Paris’s backing for Rabat. France “deeply regrets” Russia’s vote against the resolution, he told the Council, warning that an abrupt closure of MINURSO would be “extremely concerning” at a moment of renewed tensions in the area. He described the mission as essential to the…
Originally published by Google News Category Diplomacy
