Driss Benzekri, 57; ex-political prisoner ran Moroccan truth panel

Driss Benzekri, 57, a former political prisoner who later headed a truth commission in Morocco, died Sunday in Rabat of complications from stomach cancer, said Abdelhamid Amin, a former president of the Moroccan Assn. for Human Rights.

Benzekri was president of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, founded in 2004 by Morocco’s King Mohammed VI to look into past human rights abuses -- including under the monarch’s father, King Hassan II.

It was the first such truth-seeking body in the Arab world and has been praised as a model for other Arab countries confronting dark pasts.

Benzekri, a former Marxist, was one of many Moroccans illegally detained, imprisoned, tortured, or forcibly “disappeared” by state security forces from the 1950s to the 1990s. The commission put the number of victims in the hundreds; most human rights activists say it is in the thousands.

Last year, the commission issued a report naming those it judged perpetrators of abuses, outlining a reparations plan for victims and calling for institutional and legislative reforms to prevent further human rights violations.