Jamal Benomar

Jamal Benomar
Benomar at Chatham House in 2013
Born	1957 (1957) (age 60) Nador, Morocco
Occupation	United Nations Under Secretary-General

Jamal Benomar (Arabic: جمال بن عمر‎‎; born c. April 1957) is the Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on Conflict Prevention, at the level of Under Secretary-General (USG). His 25-year diplomatic career at the UN has focused on peacebuilding and governance issues in conflict countries, including Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq. He holds a PHD from the University of London and has lectured at the University of Paris VII. He previously worked for the Carter Center and Amnesty International. He is currently leading the UN response to the political crisis in Burundi.

Benomar was born in c. April 1957 in Nador, north of Morocco. At 19, as a political activist known for his peaceful opposition to the government, he was arrested and imprisoned for eight years.

“I just ‘disappeared’,” he told the New Internationalist in 1986. “That night I was tortured from midnight to 5 o’clock in the morning. They used the classical methods: binding the hands and feet of my naked body to an iron bar and whipping the soles of my feet while forcing my head back in a bucket of excrement.”

After eight months in a secret detention centre in Casablanca, Benomar was finally charged—with conspiracy to overthrow the government, threatening state security, and membership of illegal organisations—and moved to a regular jail.

He and other political prisoners went on a hunger strike to demand their right to a fair trial. The trial finally took place. It lasted seven weeks, and at the end, Benomar and his fellow 130 defendants were all found guilty and handed heavy sentences.

By this time, Amnesty International had been made aware of the cases, and each of the 130 prisoners was adopted by a regional group. Benomar's group in Sweden wrote to him for two years before he finally received one of their letters. When he and other prisoners went on a 45-day hunger strike, Amnesty sent telegrams and issued appeals on their behalf. "It was a great moral support to know that there were people in the other end of the world who were organising all these activities for my release, people who didn't know me but were concerned about human rights," Benomar said. It gave me quite a lot of courage."