After I was sent to prison on January 1, 2014, I remained isolated from what was happening outside my cell, and this forced isolation lasted for a year. After the Court of First Instance sentenced me to death in December of the same year, the authorities allowed my family to visit me for the first time.
It was my sister who visited me. On her second visit she came full of hope. A hope that was missing for a while because local Mauritanian organizations were against my case and because at the time the necessary attention and support from international human rights organizations was lacking. She told me how she received a friendly phone call from a man named Kacem El Ghazzali and how he supported her at a time when I was sentenced to death and did not even have a lawyer.
Kacem El Ghazzali has since been fighting for my freedom at all levels, right up to the United Nations, where he was the first person to publicly communicate my case to the Human Rights Council and other international actors, which had the greatest impact on my case. from that moment on, my case took a different, more positive path. Kacem El Ghazzali continues the fight for my freedom in constant communication with my family and provides assistance at all levels, until the day of my release.
Yet his help did not stop there when I arrived in Europe as a refugee, as I found him again with me at the beginning of my journey: he contacted me less than an hour after my arrival in Europe and he helped me with the first steps of my life in freedom, it is the help without which I would not be where I am now while writing these words.
I truly hope that he will continue his work, because the hope he plants in the hearts of those who long for freedom is invaluable, especially for those of us who will be forgotten on the other side of the world – that is in the Sahel and Sahara region – where many international human rights organizations ignore our existence for lack of geopolitical interests, in such forgotten parts of the world it is only people like Kacem El Ghazzali who see human rights as a vocation and not as a job, who feel and understand our suffering.