[5] The negotiations were being supervised by Peter van Walsum, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's personal envoy for Western Sahara.
Polisario insisted on the 1991 agreement's use of a Spanish census, taken immediately before the Moroccan occupation in 1975, as the basis of voter registration.
These documents both involved full voting rights for all persons resident in the territory, including those Polisario had referred to as "settlers", irrespective of what MINURSO's voter identification commission had arrived at.
The first Baker plan was circulated as a draft, and energetically supported by Morocco, but after Polisario voiced equally strong opposition, it was discarded by the Security Council.
In contrast, the latter, more detailed version was sponsored by a UN Security Council resolution (SCR 1495) in the summer of 2003, and thereafter cautiously accepted by Polisario, allegedly after strong Algerian pressure.
Polisario argued that Morocco had thus broken a main condition of the 1991 cease-fire agreement, which had wholly hinged on the independence referendum, but despite this, it did not resume fighting.