Saving of about 2 billion dirhams of difference between the amounts requested and the judgments pronounced
Despite these figures, which are a clear improvement on previous years, lawsuits against the state remain at a high level, which raises many questions.
While waiting for the publication of the final report of the Kingdom’s Judicial Agency, the first figures have just been revealed. According to the report of the Ministry of Economy and Finance concerning the defense of the State and the prevention of administrative, civil, penal and commercial conflicts, approximately 10,000 additional cases have been registered during this year. This is a provisional figure, but it is lower than the statistics in the last report of the Kingdom’s Judicial Agency. Officials had reported in fact that the Agency defended the state during the year 2020 in 17,708 new cases, compared to 20,320 in 2019, 17,528 in 2018, 17,220 in 2017 and 17,864 in 2016. The 10,000 new cases during this year, therefore, remain significantly lower than the statistics for the past five years.
The Ministry of Economy and Finance has also announced that during the same period it was able to save no less than 2 billion dirhams in the difference between the amounts claimed in lawsuits brought by aggrieved individuals and the judgments handed down by the courts. Despite these figures, which are a clear improvement on previous years, the number of lawsuits against the State remains high, which raises many questions. Faced with this situation and in an attempt to reverse the trend in the years to come, government authorities are playing the awareness card. In concrete terms, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, which has the Kingdom’s Judicial Agency under its supervision, is rolling out a training plan for administrations with the aim of training civil servants in risk management and anticipation. Among the ministerial and institutional departments concerned by the training provided in recent months, the Ministry of Finance cites the Interior, the Court of Auditors, Housing and Urban Planning, the Office of Vocational Training … It must be said that a good part of the cases against the State concerns the expropriation of land for public use. It is the AJR that defends the State in court.
The intervention of the AJR, either as plaintiff or defendant, concerns practically all areas of activity of public administrations. These include, among others, appeals for annulment of administrative decisions on the grounds of abuse of power; contractual liability of legal persons under public law (disputes relating to administrative or common law contracts, social disputes, disputes arising from the application of texts relating to pensions, death benefits, indemnities, etc.); actions brought by the AJR on behalf of the State for damages, including those relating to the right to a fair trial.); actions brought by the AJR on behalf of the State to assert a right (recourse against the third party responsible, evacuation of administrative housing, application of the law on artistic property, constitution of a civil party, etc.) as well as the processing of notices of legal proceedings against State employees, the constitution of a lawyer to defend civil servants who have been victims of aggression, etc.
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