The Constitutional Court’s decision Tuesday not to examine the constitutionality of the law regulating Morocco’s legal profession marks “a first” in relations between Parliament and the country’s highest constitutional jurisdiction, according to Rabat Bar lawyer Khalid El Idrissi.
The controversial legislation, already adopted by Parliament, was referred to the Constitutional Court on July 7 by House of Representatives Speaker Rachid Talbi Alami for a ruling on whether its provisions comply with the Constitution.
A month later, however, the Court said it was unable to conduct that review because of a procedural defect in the file submitted to it.
The problem concerned the version of the legislation sent to the court. The Court said that for it to exercise constitutional review, it must receive either the original or a certified copy of the legislation in the form definitively adopted by Parliament.
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“The responsibility for this impasse is shared between Parliament and the Constitutional Court,” El Idrissi said. He also questioned why it took the Court a month to identify the procedural problem and issue its decision. “Why wait a month to rule? There was a delay,” he said.
Can the referral be corrected?
The Court’s decision leaves the future of the legislation uncertain, but El Idrissi disputes interpretations suggesting that the constitutional review process has necessarily reached a dead end.
According to the lawyer, the speaker of the House of Representatives can correct the referral by submitting the version of the law that corresponds to the text definitively adopted by Parliament.
Two scenarios—and a lawyers’ strike
If the procedural problem is not corrected, El Idrissi sees two possible scenarios for the legislation.
“Either the text remains suspended until the installation of the future government resulting from the upcoming elections, or it is published as it stands in the Official Gazette, in a particularly sensitive context marked by the indefinite general strike being observed by the Kingdom’s approximately 20,000 lawyers,” he said.
Publishing the legislation under the current circumstances, he warned, “could further aggravate the crisis.”
Moroccan lawyers have launched an open-ended nationwide strike over the legislation, bringing proceedings in courts across the country to a standstill in numerous cases.
The Constitutional Court’s decision therefore adds a procedural complication to an already deep dispute over the future rules governing the profession.
Rather than settling the controversy over whether the legislation complies with Morocco’s Constitution, the Court has left that substantive question unanswered because the correct version of the law was not formally placed before it.
El Idrissi reiterated his position in favor of simply withdrawing the bill altogether.
