Committee on Petitions and Motions Holds Coordinative Meeting at Ministry of State in Charge of Human Rights and Relations with Parliament on Thursday, February 4th, 2021

Members of the Committee on Petitions and Motions Abdellatif Benyaacoub and Omar Abbasi took part, on Thursday, February 4^th, 2021, in a coordinative meeting at the Ministry of State in Charge of Human Rights and Relations with Parliament. The meeting was chaired by Minister of State in Charge of Human Rights and Relations with Parliament Mustapha Ramid and attended by the General Secretary of the Ministry, the members of the Government Petitions Committee, and representatives of the Head of Government, the General Secretariat of the Government, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, and the House of Councilors.

The meeting was at the initiative of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, aiming at forming a joint committee that gathers all the concerned parties. The Committee will take charge of examining the parliamentary bills proposed by the Committee on Petitions and Motions at the House of Representatives to amend Organic Law 44.14 defining the conditions and modalities for exercising the right to petition public authorities and Organic Law 64.14 setting the conditions and modalities for exercising the right to submit motions on legislation, with the aim of coming up with a unified and consensual draft.

The meeting was marked by discussing several fundamental aspects that relate mainly to the work methodology that will be adopted, the main axes of the reform, and the goals aspired from the latter.

The participants unanimously stressed the importance of participatory democracy, for it complements representative democracy. In the same respect, they noted the imperative of working on bringing it closer to citizens by easing the requirements for submitting petitions and motions, and later speeding up the full digitization of this mechanism.

The participants concluded the meeting by agreeing on the convention of weekly meetings to examine and debate the contents of the proposed amendments with the presence of all the concerned parties.