Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 8 Stat. 484 (1836), Still US Law | IACHR P-1365-26  ·  OHCHR h6a662eo | The Full Legal Record →
Two positions that cannot both be true

"The longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history." "Obsolete and without effect." The same government. The same treaty.

In House Resolution 251, introduced March 25, 2025, members of the United States Congress placed on the Congressional Record that the 1836 Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the Empire of Morocco and the United States remains the longest unbroken relationship in the nation's history. In a State Department note of March 17, 1959, the same government called that same treaty obsolete and without effect. Both cannot be true. One of them is false, and whichever one the United States chooses, the people the treaty protected were never lawfully removed from it.

The rules the fraud cannot escape

International law does not merely forbid this. It provides express provisions for fraud, corruption, and coercion, and a principle that reaches all three.

"If a State has been induced to conclude a treaty by the fraudulent conduct of another negotiating State, the State may invoke the fraud as invalidating its consent to be bound."
— Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article 49 (customary international law)

Article 49 reaches fraud; Article 50 reaches corruption of a state's representative; Article 51 reaches coercion of a representative; Article 52 makes an instrument procured by force void. Behind them stands a general principle of law recognized by nations: fraus omnia corrumpit, fraud vitiates everything founded on it. And a wrongdoer cannot acquire rights through its own fraud, nor plead the victim's silence as consent. These rules are invoked as customary international law, binding regardless of ratification.

Four elements, each from the record

The fraud is not an accusation resting on interpretation. Each of its elements is documented in the United States' own government records.

Concealment of prior status
The class was absorbed as citizens through the collective operation of the Fourteenth Amendment without any disclosure of the treaty status being extinguished, while the United States' own 1906 report to Congress (House Document 326) held that a subject of Morocco could lose that status only by voluntarily choosing another nationality, with disclosure and with Morocco's consent. Consent obtained by concealing a material fact is fraud.
Misrepresented authority
The 1959 note was coordinated through France, a party whose authority the Sultan had declared "lapsed" in 1943, and was addressed to the Kingdom of Morocco, a state France constituted in 1956, not the Empire of Morocco that signed the treaty. Presenting the acquiescence of the wrong party as the treaty party's consent is fraud on the instrument.
Coercion
The status was suppressed under conditions of enslavement and penal coercion, and, in the present, under Alien Enemies Act enforcement. Consent or acquiescence extracted under coercion is void (Article 52).
The concealed forum
In 1956, Public Law 856 closed the only forum in which a member of the class could raise the treaty, and created no replacement, removing the very means by which the fraud could be detected and challenged.
Why it never heals

Fraud has no statute of limitations, no cure by silence, and returns no profit to the wrongdoer. That is what makes this the strongest ground of all.

A fraudulently concealed injury is not defeated by delay: the sixty-seven years without a remedy are a product of the concealment, not a defense to it. The class cannot be estopped by a silence enforced through a forum the United States itself closed. Every act built on the fraudulent chain, the renaming, the application of Alien Enemies Act enforcement, inherits the taint. And the United States cannot invoke the "changed circumstances" its own fraud created.

The status was never lawfully, nor honestly, removed. It is intact. You were not brought into someone else's story. You were renamed inside your own, and it was done to hide a fraud that does not expire.