Justice and communication

While it is perfectly necessary and strongly demanded that judges be able to exercise law and do justice in the most independent and impartial manner, it is still necessary that time limits be reasonable; that decisions be understandable, that justice be accessible to all and listen to all and, first and foremost, to the victims. In short, justice must be communicative and be a true public service that ensures the application of the law and guarantees respect for the rights of all.

For all this to take place, for citizens to have access to a public service of justice, the magistrates in the exercise of their independent judicial power will need to mobilize human, financial and logistical resources, to put in place an administrative apparatus, to establish an organization for the functioning of the courts, This means that justice cannot be reduced to the independence of the judge and good judgment to his impartiality, otherwise there is a risk of not grasping this complexity of judicial action which makes it not enough to have judged independently for having judged well, hence the considerable challenge of judicial administration in the processes of justice reform, whether in Morocco or internationally.

The administration of justice must ensure that justice is closer to citizens, more efficient and more accessible, i.e. a well-administered judicial system is a system that ensures that it informs and communicates in such a way that it can contribute to social cohesion and the country's development.

In recent years, in many countries, communication has occupied a prominent place in the tools of public administration reforms, including judicial administrations, and has now become a strategic dimension of public governance, to the extent that ministerial departments, national institutions, public administrations and even courts make extensive use of external communication as a tool to support and reinforce their decisions and actions.

The recognition of the fundamental role that communication can play in public service governance has not failed to translate in different international experiences into a series of reforms aimed at modernizing the public sector and promoting communication as an inherent part of public action and essential for democracy and citizen participation.
In Morocco, the adoption of the new constitution in 2011 made it possible to register decisive advances in public governance, representing not only a real acceleration of the process of modernization of institutions already underway, but also a turning point in the progressive transformation of the mode of public governance, in terms of transparency, accountability and openness to the citizen.

The legislative and regulatory texts that have been enacted in this framework have really filled the legal vacuum in terms of communication in the governance of public services, have fixed the modalities for receiving, monitoring and processing users' comments, complaints and proposals, have guaranteed citizens the right of access to information, have stipulated the simplification and digitization of administrative procedures, All this in order to establish a systematized and effective communication, to establish a relationship of respect and trust between the administration and the users, and thus this reform process has been able to regulate, promote and consolidate the communication of the public administration as a relevant tool of governance of the public service, but also as a fundamental right of the users.

It should also be noted in this context that the public governance system in Morocco finds itself today, and more than ever, in the need to provide its services to populations that are increasingly demanding and better informed of their rights and obligations than ever before. Therefore, it has been essential in this regard that public bodies, and more particularly administrative ones, have been able to bring, in particular since a decade ago, the concern for communication as an integrated component in the service offered to society, without forgetting that the democratization process in Morocco, as well as the widening of the margin of rights and freedoms, have facilitated the emergence of a public space that has allowed a greater listening to social demand and has pushed State institutions to carry out communication projects to improve their relations with citizens.

What is the situation in the public service of justice? It seems that it would be entirely legitimate to ask to what extent the judicial administration has been able to develop communication practices that are part of a public service governance logic and are based on the judicial administration's duty to inform users and citizens about the services to which they are entitled.

Like the major reforms of judicial systems undertaken in many countries, and which have been based on the principles of good governance with the aim of making the governance of the public service of justice more open, transparent and participatory, the Moroccan judicial system, following the 2011 constitution, and in implementation of the high royal instructions, has entered a new phase marked by new principles and choices that have come to lay the foundations of a remarkable structural transformation of its functioning, I will cite two texts of law:

In the framework of the new provisions of the Moroccan constitution of 2011, promoting the right of access to information as one of the constitutional rights, the law 31-13 has allowed citizens to access information held by certain legal persons of public law such as the House of Representatives, the House of Councilors, public administrations and the courts, this is how the law relating to the right of access to information, in terms of transparency and good governance has inscribed the courts at the heart of the bodies with a public service mission.

In addition to the law on access to information, there is also the law on judicial organization which provides, according to article 36, the way in which the judicial institution will fulfill its duty of information, by designating the judicial officer as the official spokesperson of the court to whom journalists must necessarily address, in order to access the required information. It also provides that the courts may, where appropriate, communicate directly with the media in order to enlighten public opinion, so that beyond seeking to satisfy the right to information of the users of the public service of justice, the challenge would be to resort to the media as means of expression and information that allow everyone to be informed, but also to form their opinion.

The same law establishes in Article 25 that the courts will adopt the digital management of judicial proceedings, in accordance with the judicial administration digitalization programs developed and implemented by the government authority in charge of justice, in close coordination with the Superior Council of the Judiciary and the Presidency of the Public Prosecutor's Office.

In this sense, ICTs currently play an influential role in the communication of the judicial administration, their use offers users and litigants effective means of access to information, as well as providing lawyers and magistrates with new working tools to deal with cases. Like other experiences at the international level, the digital transformation of the modalities of access to information in Morocco offers today to legal professionals, as well as to all citizens, several advantages, including the possibility of consulting legal documents accessible on the Internet.

Without any exaggeration, I can affirm that in Morocco, among the institutions most committed to the processes of inscribing the communication function as a mechanism of good governance, the judicial institution has distinguished itself by its remarkable communicative openness in recent years, despite the specificity of its governance, which is based on an administrative system managed jointly by the two executive and judicial branches, and which seems to lead this regalian institution to a complexity of communicative practices that are far from being stable and homogeneous.

It must be said that today, and since the reform of the judicial system framed by the principles of the new constitution, the communication related to the governance of the public service of justice does not fail to receive a clear recognition from the actors involved, a recognition that translates into the construction of new information and communication practices, which deserve to be studied and valued.

Public communication is essentially for the judicial institution in Morocco a communication of information and a tool of governance of the public service of justice, it consists of making available to citizens and users the information produced or received, regardless of its medium, by the judicial administration.

This generally concerns information necessary to facilitate access to justice, as well as the evaluation of its performance, and relates to judicial rules and procedures, statistical data on the activity of the courts, as well as information on the management of human and financial resources of the public justice service.

The analysis of the founding texts of justice reform, as well as field research on the perceptions of the main actors of the judicial system, have shown us how the communicative practices of the judicial administration represent in their complexity the expression of the capacity of this real institution to integrate ICTs, to open up to society and to make itself understood by its users.

The instability of these communicative practices currently assumed as embryonic activities of production and reproduction of the field of public communication of the judicial institution, inscribes this communication in a process of transformation, which will need time to evolve in an ecosystem in constant change and strongly marked by a series of projects aimed at strengthening digital communication and further modernizing the Moroccan judicial system.