Minister of Justice Presents Measures Taken by His Department to Ensure the Continuance of Work within Judicial Administrations and to Protect Human Resources in Courts from COVID-19 before Competent Committee
The Justice, Legislation, and Human Rights Committee under the House of Representatives held a meeting on June 2nd, 2020, chaired by the Committee’s Chairperson Taoufik Mimouni, with Minister of Justice Mohamed Benabdelkader. The meeting was devoted to discussing the precautionary measures taken by the Ministry of Justice to ensure the continuance of work within judicial administrations amidst fighting COVID-19.
The Minister initiated his presentation by stating that “the Ministry, like other public administrations, took several measures. These measures include suspending holding hearings in courts of the Kingdom from March 17th, as part of the precautionary measures aiming to limit the propagation of COVID-19, and to protect the personnel of courts, including judges, employees, paralegals, litigants, and beneficiaries, in coordination with the Presidency of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Supreme Council of the Judiciary.”
The Minister added that “holding trials via videoconference was dictated by the repercussions of COVID-19. The measure was implemented to protect the health of detainees and the law enforcement officers responsible for transporting and surveilling them, as well as the health of judges, officials of the penitentiary administration, and the personnel of courts.”
Also, the Minister noted that his department had created about 190 electronic accounts, since the launch of remote adjudication, which were disseminated to courts and penitentiary institutions. The Ministry coordinated with the judicial officials, and the regional penitentiary directorates to provide courts and special rooms in penitentiary institutions with computers equipped with the necessary programs for this sake. The operation took four days.
Besides, the Minister noted that despite the absence of a legal text that enables using this technology, “the general conditions our Country is undergoing because of the pandemic, and the keenness of the judiciary to engage in the national effort to limit its propagation, and its aim to protect judges, registrars, counselors, and detainees imposed tripartite committee meetings to be held within the country’s courts of appeal between the first presidents of these courts, the King’s public prosecutors within these courts, and the batonniers of the Bar. The participants agreed on adopting this technology, considering its efficiency and necessity during this period.”
As for the outcomes of remote trials, the Minister noted that, after four weeks of adopting this technology, the operation achieved promising results reflected in the recorded numbers and statistics. The number of trials held remotely reached 1469 trials, which tackled 22,268 cases. These trials issued 9053 sentences.
Special priority and importance were given to the information security of the operation, in full respect of the directives of the Information Systems Security Directorate within the National Defense Administration, to protect the adopted audiovisual system.
The Minister qualified this measure as historic, as it will enable the introduction of digitization and remote communication in the judicial work. The Minister stressed the importance of building on the gains of the experience of remote adjudication and its efficiency to engage in a more comprehensive plan that does not only include the reform of the Codes of Criminal and Civil Procedure, as legislation constructs a tool to implement a mutual perspective. Thus, we should start working on a course of action that promotes the model of judicial administration so that it incorporates remote communication technologies and artificial intelligence during the different steps of judicial services.
In addition, the Minister revealed the outcomes of digitizing work within courts in the Kingdom since the start of the state of public health emergency on March 20th to June 1st. As regards the management of work within judicial administrations amidst COVID-19, the Minister presented a record related to the logistic figures of disinfecting courts and their facilities.
Commenting on the Minister’s presentation, the participating Committee members highlighted some aspects that concern the management of the current phase. In this respect, they tackled the conditions of the continuance of work within courts of first instance and courts of appeal, in addition to balancing between social distancing measures and providing judicial services. The deputies also tackled the adoption of digital deliberations as part of developing remote services, and the legal and constitutional impacts of suspending trials. To overcome the issues that arose in remote adjudication, some deputies urged the Minister to improve the videoconference technology adopted for this purpose and to tightly regulate the submitted cases to ensure the efficiency of judicial facilities in alignment with the social distancing measures.
Also, the Committee members commended the State’s measures to fight COVID-19 under the wise leadership of HM King Mohammed VI, which enabled the Kingdom to avoid the economic and social repercussions of the pandemic.
The deputies focused on the importance of developing the process of digitizing the judicial system to encompass all the administrative procedures, and to ensure their fluidity and efficiency, and to preserve the gains and constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Additionally, the participants called for speeding up several legislative processes, like the project of judicial organization, and the Government bills like Government bill 10.16 amending and supplementing the Penal Code.
The deputies seized this opportunity to praise the Royal initiative of granting pardon to several detainees. In this respect, they called to consider this initiative as a message to the judiciary to deliberate on the requests of provisional release and to decrease the duration of preventive detention, which will alleviate the pressure over penitentiary institutions.