In His Participation in Meeting of FOPREL, Deputy Speaker of House of Representatives Highlights Moroccan Experience in Protecting the Environment

Deputy Speaker of House of Representatives Mohammed Ouzzine took part on Wednesday, May 12, 2021, in a meeting on the coordinate classification of environmental crimes in Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, organized by the Forum of Chairpersons of Legislative Assemblies of Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico (FOPREL) via videoconference.

The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives noted that the Kingdom of Morocco has launched, following the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, major reforms that enabled the elaboration of an environmental strategy, the launch of the Green Plan to advance agriculture and prohibit genetically modified products, and the implementation of a new waste management strategy. In the same respect, the Kingdom hosted the climate summit COP22 in Marrakech in 2016, which “was a distinguished event that consolidates the uniqueness of our country in addressing the issues of environment and sustainable development at the regional, continental, and international levels.”

Mr. Ouzzine highlighted the prominent engagement of Morocco in clean energies, and mainly solar energy, as it holds a pioneering position in this area at the international level. The percentage of renewable energies has reached 42% of the total national needs in 2020 and Morocco aspires to reach 52% by 2030.

The Deputy Speaker stated that legislators in Morocco, aware of the impact of the economic boom that Morocco has witnessed in various areas on the environment, have put more focus on environment protection and elaborated a legal framework to protect the environment and criminalize its damaging.

At the constitutional level, Mr. Ouzzine focused on Article 31, which stipulates that the State, public institutions, and territorial authorities work to guarantee the right to water and a healthy environment, and Article 35 stipulating that the State shall commit to achieving sustainable human development and preserve the national natural resources and the right of future generations to access such resources.

The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives also noted that environmental protection is receiving high royal attention, as the Royal speeches and the directives of HM King Mohammed VI have stressed this dimension. In the same context, he shed light on the evolution of the legal arsenal for decades, starting from the Dahir of October 10, 1917, on forest preservation and exploitation, followed by the continuous development and update of legal texts regulating the environmental field. The Moroccan legislation has also approved punitive and administrative sanctions for perpetrators of environmental crimes. In this respect, and parallel with Moroccan legislation, the Public Prosecutor's Office has been following the national public policies to protect environmental areas. As a result, a series of actions harmful to the environment have been criminalized. For this purpose, environmental police were created through training monitors that form the core of this organ that enhances the role of the State body in environmental protection and monitoring.

Mr. Ouzzine concluded his statement by presenting proposals and recommendations, in which he called for strengthening the legal framework related to environmental protection to overcome the gaps and shortcomings in environmental legislation in various countries of the world. He also called for supporting the exchange of experiences within the framework of South-South cooperation between Africa and Central America and invited the international civil society to engage in combatting environmental crime and to increase efforts to coordinate the classification of environmental crimes at the international level.

The Moroccan Parliament is an observing member of the FOPREL since 2014. The Forum, established in 1994, aims to support the mechanisms of application and coordination of the laws of its Member States, to create consultative mechanisms between the chairpersons of their legislative assemblies to address the various problems arising in the region, and to assist in legislative studies on the regional level.

Based in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, the Forum brings together the chairpersons of the legislative assemblies of the ten member States, namely Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.