The Committee on Justice, Legislation and Human Rights of the House of Representatives has called for a complete revision of the Code of Criminal Procedure, updating it and adapting it to developments related to rights and freedoms citizens.
These recommendations were the subject of a report published by the committee, under the supervision of its chairman, Mohamed Laâraj, on the summaries of its discussions on the report of the King’s attorney general at the Court of Cassation in his capacity as chief of the public prosecutor? on the implementation of criminal policy and the conduct of the prosecution service.
The commission also called for a complete overhaul of the whole criminal law, according to a progressive and modern approach, based on the one hand, on a modern design adequate with the spirit and the content of the constitution. And on the other hand, on a perception in conformity with the requirements of the conventions and international treaties ratified by Morocco.
In this sense, the recommendations of the parliamentary committee aim to promote individual and collective rights, the fight against corruption, the moralization of public life and the correlation between responsibility and accountability, through the rationalization of the implementation of implementation of penal policies in a way that makes freedom and the presumption of innocence the origin and pretrial detention an exception.
The report also called for changing the legal framework governing pre-trial detention and custodial sentences, approving new alternatives and enacting alternative sentences by introducing legislative amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and the Penal Code.
Development of the prosecution service
In this regard, the commission called for providing the prosecution service with the necessary support to develop and modernize its work, and to increase the number of judges, with the aim of improving the performance of the prosecution service before the courts of the Kingdom, and strengthen its role in the implementation of criminal policy and the processing of cases within a reasonable timeframe, and provide it with logistical equipment to develop the information systems of the various public prosecutor’s offices within the framework of the digital transformation in the various courts of the Kingdom.
The Committee on Justice, Legislation and Human Rights also recommended that efforts be made to provide adequate means of transport to public prosecutors to carry out the functions entrusted to them by law, namely to visit the places police custody, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, etc.
The committee also recommended providing public prosecutors with solid training in national constitutional provisions and principles and in international charters and treaties for the protection of human rights. Thus to have in-depth training in the field of international mechanisms for the protection of human rights and to strengthen their knowledge of the national mechanisms involved in this field, and the expansion of training in the field of human rights .
Collaboration between the different powers
The same commission called for the establishment of a cooperation link between the two authorities during the legislative process, especially since the implementation of the independence of justice requires activating the provisions of the first chapter of the constitution relating to the collaboration of the powers, in particular at the level of legislation.
The report recalls that collaboration enables the Presidency of the Public Prosecutor’s Office to contribute, alongside state authorities, to the implementation of public policies in the areas that fall within its competence.
The same source underlined that legal certainty and the support of confidence in the judicial institution should not be the responsibility of the judicial authority alone, because justice in its broad concept is not limited to the judicial authority and that it has roots that extend to legislative and executive authority which can contribute through their apparatuses to uphold justice.
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