Before the Commission for the Interior, Local Authorities, Housing and Urban Policy, the Minister of the Interior, Abdelouafi Laftit, presented Thursday, bill n°18.18 relating to the organization of appeals for public generosity and the distribution of aid for charitable purposes.
While the ” scams » have multiplied in recent years in the name of ” charity” this new bill led by the Minister of the Interior proposes a renewed vision aimed at encouraging and organizing charitable action in such a way as to increase its profitability and effectiveness by adopting rules of good governance, based in particular on the transparency of fundraising and aid distribution operations.
During the meeting of the Commission for the examination of this bill, the Minister of the Interior confirmed his availability to discuss all the amendments that the parliamentary groups will deem necessary to develop the project.
While the bill has been criticized by several civil authorities, a source who attended the meeting told MoroccoLatestNewsthat ” the opposition groups will work on preparing their amendments to this draft, the detailed discussions of which will be completed next week”.
For his part, the Minister indicated before the Interior Commission that this law ” intervenes in execution of the royal instructions which consist in taking the necessary legal measures in order to supervise the operations of solicitation of public charity and distribution of aid. The project also falls within the framework of the royal directives contained in the speech of October 12, 2018 on the occasion of the opening of the first session of the third legislative year of the tenth legislature”.
The shortcomings of the current law (n°004.71) relating to public charity, according to Laftit, are represented by “ the lack of control in the organization and announcement of public charity solicitation operations and its inability to include new technical means (sms, e-mail, websites, radio and television), the lack of precision of the damage caused to others as well as the absence of rules of control of the way of expenditure of the incomes resulting from the said operations “.
In this regard, the Minister of the Interior, who wanted to defend this PL, indicated that “the bill provides new responses and solutions that accompany societal developments in Morocco, and are in line with modern technology, with the aim of encouraging volunteering and donation actions, good management and the rationalization and simplification of procedures to facilitate the granting of donations.
The project also aims, according to Laftit, to “ encourage and organize charitable work in such a way as to increase its profitability and efficiency by adopting rules of good governance based mainly on guaranteeing the transparency and reliability of donation collection and distribution operations”.
For more transparency and reliability, the Minister specified that the purpose of this new text is to subject all operations of appeal to public generosity to the procedure of prior authorization with the administration, whatever the means. used in the call, traditional or electronic.
Thus, the collection of donations consists of two objectives, specified the minister. The first relates to the financing of the carrying out of activities or projects of a social, humanitarian, solidarity, charitable or cultural nature, and the aid or subsidy of people in need or legally created non-profit social institutions, whether whether inside or outside Morocco.
Based on these two objectives, he asserted that “ any process of inviting the public to collect donations to achieve commercial, advertising or electoral objectives, or to promote products, goods or services, or to pay fines, debts, costs or compensation for which judicial decisions or executions are carried out, is prohibited “.
Another clarification provided by the Minister concerns the call for public generosity. Limited action, according to Abdelouafi Laftit, only to civil society associations, unless the objective is to provide aid in case of urgent need, stressing the obligation to deposit the sums of money from this operation in an account bank dedicated to this purpose and not to continue to receive donations outside the time limits reserved for collection.
The new draft law stipulates granting the competence to the administration in general, and to the territorially competent local administrative authority in particular, to follow and control all the stages of the operations of collection of public funds and distribution of help,” said the minister.
In addition, Laftit further detailed, the organizing party is obliged to communicate to the administration a detailed report on the progress of this operation, as well as all the documents and information proving the allocation of all the sums collected for the purposes announced. , while the distributing entity will have to submit to the administration all the information and documents relating to the distribution of the aid, and to specify the estimated financial value of the aid to be distributed, while specifying the sources of its financing.
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