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Rabat: Eight Moroccan rights activists jailed for chanting anti-monarchy slogans during Labour Day demonstrations last year were set free on Friday after receiving a royal pardon, the government said.
Seventeen people were arrested after marches in the northern town of Ksar Al Kebir and the coastal resort of Agadir on May 1 and charged with "harming Morocco's sacred values".
Five of them were sentenced to four years in prison, one was jailed for three years and two others received two-year prison terms. The other nine were given suspended sentences.
"His Majesty King Mohammad VI has accorded his pardon in favour of 17 people pursued after the demonstrations on May 1, 2007," the government said in a statement.
Abdul Hamid Amine, vice-president of Morocco's leading human rights group AMDH, said those jailed had denied chanting slogans hostile to King Mohammad.
"The pardon is good news but it's also the correction of a judicial error," he said. "These people should never have been jailed simply for exercising their right to free speech."
Quick to penalise
Since acceding to the throne in 1999, King Mohammad has shown more tolerance of dissent than his father King Hassan, whose reign came to be known as the 'Years of Lead'.
In 2004 he announced the Arab world's first truth commission to investigate rights abuses and disappearances of government opponents and to compensate victims and their families.
New independent newspapers and magazines are freer than before to criticise senior officials and hold them to account.
But the monarchy still wields ultimate power and the government is quick to punish those who appear to show hostility to the king in public.
Amine said one young man had been jailed after unwittingly ripping up a magazine that contained a picture of the king.
A woman seeking a divorce was imprisoned last year for saying her husband sat around at home all day doing nothing "like a king", said Amine.
Ahmad Nacer, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old, was jailed in September over comments he made during an argument with a bus driver which officials said "harmed Morocco's sacred values". He died in prison in February.
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