Lawyers will continue their four-month-old strike after the country’s bar associations unanimously decided on Thursday to stay away from courts, with their leadership now pinning hopes for a settlement on the government that emerges after the September 23 elections.
The decision was taken at a meeting of the executive board of the National Association of Moroccan Bar Associations (ABAM), which brings together the country’s 17 bar associations. It will meet again on September 20 to take stock of the situation and decide its next move.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, ABAM President Lahcen Ziani appeared to rule out much progress with the outgoing government.
“We hope to reach a solution with the future government that will emerge from the September 23 elections,” he said.
The lawyers have been boycotting court proceedings for four months over the law governing the profession. They accuse the government, and particularly the ministry overseeing the profession, of encroaching on the independence of lawyers.
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The prolonged strike has hit court proceedings, with hearings postponed and some defendants remaining in pretrial detention while their cases are delayed.
Ziani, however, held the government responsible for the situation and accused it of using “deception to push through its bill."
Rabat Bar President Aziz Rouibah also rejected the suggestion that lawyers should bear responsibility for the hardship caused to litigants.
“We are citizens too, and citizens must understand that the government is at the root of this crisis,” he said.
The ABAM also had a message for what it called “foreign parties” seeking to take advantage of the dispute.
“The nation’s three pillars, God, Homeland and King, are a red line that must not be crossed,” Rouibah said.
Read also : No return to court as lawyers extend strike
Ziani was equally categorical about where the dispute lay. “The dispute is between the government and the lawyers,” he said.
The meeting came after some lawyers in Casablanca broke ranks this week and returned to court, raising questions over how long the profession could maintain the boycott.
The ABAM insisted there was no split.
“These are isolated individual cases,” Ziani said, though he conceded that four months of strike action had taken a toll on lawyers “morally and materially."
For now, the association says the boycott is about the “dignity of the profession." Its executive board will meet three days before the election to decide what comes next.
