The Architecture of Moroccan Justice

A reform that reorganized without rebuilding

Every legal system needs a map of its own courts: a clear answer to which body hears a given dispute, in what order cases move upward, and who speaks for the public interest along the way. In Morocco, that map was redrawn on 30 June 2022, when Law 38-15 on judicial organization came into force. Running to 111 articles across four titles, it replaced the founding text that had governed the courts since the early years of independence, the dahir bearing Law 1-74-338 of 15 July 1974. (A dahir is a royal decree, historically the Kingdom’s highest form of legislative act.)

What Law 38-15 did, and did not do, is the first thing to grasp. It is an organic statute: it builds the courts, sets out their internal structure, and states the principles that bind them. It is not, however, the only law that matters. Morocco’s specialized courts were each created by their own special statute: commercial courts by Law 53-95, administrative courts by Law 41-90, administrative courts of appeal by Law 80-03, and proximity courts by Law 42-10. Law 38-15 repealed only the parts of those special statutes that dealt with organization — the provisions that had become redundant once a single framework existed. The rules in those statutes that govern jurisdiction (which court hears what) and procedure (how it does so) remain fully in force.

The practical lesson is that Moroccan judicial organization is layered. To know how a court is built, the reader looks to Law 38-15; to know the limits of what it may hear and how a case proceeds, the reader looks to the relevant special law and to the procedure codes. Keeping those two questions apart is the key to reading the system correctly.

The principles the system rests on

Title I of Law 38-15 opens with a short set of guiding principles. They are not decoration: each one shapes how the courts below operate.

The first is the independence of the judicial power (art. 4), which separates the courts from the legislative and executive branches and gives weight to the idea that judges decide free of outside instruction.

The second is the unity of justice (art. 5). Morocco has a single judicial order, not the dual system found in France, where ordinary and administrative courts answer to separate supreme courts. Here every chain of appeal — whether civil, criminal, commercial, or administrative — leads in the end to one apex court, the Court of Cassation. That single summit is what allows the law to be read the same way across the whole country.

The third principle, functional specialization (arts. 1 and 5), sits in productive tension with the second. Unity does not mean uniformity: within the single order, the system maintains distinct commercial and administrative courts, and inside the ordinary courts it maintains specialized sections for civil, criminal, family, and social matters. Specialization delivers expertise; unity keeps the whole coherent.

Three further principles round out the foundation. Access to justice is protected by a guarantee of legal aid for litigants without sufficient means (art. 6, echoing art. 121 of the Constitution). The rights of litigants are spelled out as a right to a fair trial, access to information, and a ruling within a reasonable time (arts. 35 to 38). And the statute confirms the structural division between those who judge and those who prosecute (arts. 52 and 53), a distinction important enough to deserve its own treatment below.

A single hierarchy in three degrees

Article 1 of Law 38-15 organizes the entire system into three degrees, a vertical ladder every case potentially climbs.

At the base sit the courts of first instance, where disputes are first heard and decided. There are three kinds: the ordinary courts of first instance (in French, tribunaux de première instance, abbreviated TPI), the commercial courts, and the administrative courts.

Above them sit the courts of the second degree, the courts of appeal, which come in general, commercial, and administrative varieties. An appeal in Morocco is not a narrow review. By what lawyers call the devolutive effect of the appeal, the court of appeal re-hears the case in both fact and law.

At the summit sits the Court of Cassation in Rabat. As explained below, it is not a third trial; it is a court that polices the correct application of the law and, in doing so, keeps the country’s case law unified.

Who prosecutes and who judges: the standing magistracy

Before describing the individual courts, one institution must be understood, because it appears, in different guises, at almost every level: the ministère public, the body of magistrates that represents society and the general interest. Foreign readers should resist translating it simply as “the prosecution,” because its role is broader and more variable than that label suggests.

One institution, two roles

The ministère public acts differently depending on the matter before the court.

In criminal cases it is a principal party. It triggers and conducts the public action (the prosecution) in the name of society, and its presence at the hearing is mandatory, on pain of nullity: a criminal judgment reached without it is void.

In civil, commercial, and family matters its usual role is that of a joined party (partie jointe). Here it does not drive the case. Instead, in the categories the law designates as “communicable,” the file is passed to it so that it may give its formal opinion or conclusions. Those categories cover matters where a public interest is at stake: the protection of minors and persons under legal incapacity, questions of personal status, and issues touching public order.

Three terms that are easy to confuse

Ministère public and parquet name the same institution. Both refer to the corps of magistrates known as the “standing” magistracy (la magistrature debout), so called because they rise to address the court, as opposed to the “seated” magistrates of the bench (le siège) who remain seated to judge. Ministère public is the functional, official label, the role; parquet is the concrete, collective name for that team attached to a particular court.

The procureur du Roi (the King’s prosecutor) is something narrower: a specific office, not a synonym for the institution. The title belongs to the head of the parquet at the level of the court of first instance, who directs it with the help of his deputies (substituts). The title changes as one climbs:

• at the court of first instance, the procureur du Roi, assisted by deputies;
• at the court of appeal, the procureur général du Roi, assisted by advocates-general (avocats généraux);
• at the Court of Cassation, the procureur général du Roi at the Court of Cassation, assisted by a first advocate-general and advocates-general.

Present in most courts, absent in one

The standing magistracy is present throughout the ordinary judicial order — at the courts of first instance, the courts of appeal, and the Court of Cassation — and it is present in the commercial courts. The military tribunal has its own ministère public under Law 108-13.

The major exception is the administrative courts. The administrative tribunals and administrative courts of appeal have no parquet at all. The function is performed instead by a different officer, the commissaire royal de la loi et du droit, provided for in art. 3 of Law 80-03. The commissaire royal does not prosecute and is not a party to the case. He intervenes independently to deliver a reasoned legal opinion that helps the court reach its decision — his nearest functional cousin is the French rapporteur public.

The courts of the common order

Courts of first instance (TPI)

The court of first instance is the workhorse of the system. It is staffed by a president and one or more vice-presidents, by the bench magistrates who judge, by the parquet magistrates (the procureur du Roi and deputies) who stand, and by a registry (greffe) with separate chiefs of registry for the bench and for the parquet (Law 38-15, Title II).

Internally, each court of first instance is required to contain a full set of divisions: a family section, and civil, criminal, real-estate, commercial, social, and proximity-justice chambers. As a rule, a single judge decides. For certain sensitive categories, however, the law requires a collegial bench of three magistrates: real-estate disputes, matters of personal status other than divorce by mutual consent, and cases that may result in detention, among others.

On jurisdiction, the court of first instance holds the residual or general competence of the system: it hears any matter not assigned by law to another court (art. 54). Under the Code of Civil Procedure currently in force, it rules in first and last instance (with no appeal) up to 3,000 MAD. That figure holds until 24 August 2026, when the new Code of Civil Procedure enacted as Law 58.25 takes effect and raises the civil first-and-last-instance threshold to 10,000 MAD.

Inside each court of first instance, the proximity-justice sections handle the smallest disputes. Under art. 10 of Law 42-10 they hear personal and movable claims worth 5,000 MAD or less, but they are barred from personal-status matters, real estate, social cases, and evictions.

Courts of appeal

The court of appeal is the second degree. Because of the devolutive effect, it does not merely check the first judgment for error; it tries the case again on the facts and the law. Each court of appeal may be divided into civil, criminal, social, and personal-status chambers, and it may also contain a financial-crimes section and a terrorism section (arts. 68 and 69 of Law 38-15). Ordinary judgments are rendered by a bench of three counselors unless a specific text provides otherwise.

The criminal ladder deserves a note. Petty offenses (contraventions) are tried by the criminal formation of the court of first instance. Mid-level offenses (délits) are tried by its correctional chamber. The most serious offenses (crimes) are tried at first instance by a criminal chamber at the court of appeal, with a further appeal to a criminal appeal chamber within the same court — a second criminal degree confirmed by the new Code of Criminal Procedure (Law 03-23, in force since September 2025).

The Court of Cassation

At the top sits the Court of Cassation, and the most important thing to say about it is what it is not: it is not a third degree of trial. It does not re-hear the facts. It is a judge of law, reviewing only the legality of the decision below. When it finds that the trial judges applied or interpreted the law incorrectly, it quashes the decision and, as a rule, refers the case to a trial court to be heard again.

Sitting in Rabat under a First President and a procureur général, the Court is organized into seven chambers: a first civil chamber, and chambers for personal status and succession, real estate, commercial matters, administrative matters, social matters, and criminal matters. A valid judgment requires a public hearing, a bench of at least five counselors, and the presence of the parquet (art. 87).

The specialized jurisdictions

Alongside the ordinary courts, four specialized tracks handle defined categories of dispute. Each was created by its own statute, and each, except the proximity courts, ultimately feeds into the Court of Cassation.

Commercial courts

The commercial courts hear commercial acts and contracts, disputes between merchants, questions of commercial paper, company-law matters, and disputes over business assets (fonds de commerce), under art. 5 of Law 53-95. They are competent only for claims whose principal exceeds 20,000 MAD (art. 6 of Law 53-95, as amended by Law 18-02). Below that figure, competence falls to the ordinary court of first instance through its commercial chamber. From 24 August 2026, Law 58.25 adds that in areas with no commercial court, the court of first instance will hear commercial disputes up to 80,000 MAD (art. 31).

Administrative courts

The administrative courts hear the litigation of the state and public bodies: actions to annul administrative acts for excess of power (the recours pour excès de pouvoir), disputes over administrative contracts, pensions, tax, expropriation, Treasury debts, and the status of civil servants (art. 8 of Law 41-90). Their subject-matter competence is unlimited in value. Appeals go to the administrative court of appeal within 30 days (art. 9 of Law 80-03), where a bench of three counselors sits alongside the commissaire royal.

Proximity courts

The proximity courts are built for speed and access. Their procedure is oral and free of charge, and they decide the smallest claims — personal and movable actions of 5,000 MAD or less, along with a defined set of minor petty offenses (arts. 10 and 14 to 18 of Law 42-10). They rule in first and last instance. The only route of challenge is a narrow application to set the judgment aside, brought before the president of the court of first instance within 8 days. This is the one branch of the system that does not lead to the Court of Cassation.

The military tribunal

The permanent military tribunal exercises criminal jurisdiction over military personnel for military offenses, under Law 108-13 on military justice (2014). It sits as a mixed bench of magistrates and officers, with a cassation appeal provided by the same statute.

One order, many doors, a single reading of the law

The architecture that emerges is easier to navigate once its logic is clear. Morocco runs a single judicial order, so that however a case begins — in a civil chamber, a commercial court, or an administrative tribunal — it climbs a hierarchy that converges, with the lone exception of the proximity courts, on one apex. Specialization is achieved not by splitting the system but by distributing expertise.

Above all of it stands the Court of Cassation, not as a third chance to win on the facts but as the guarantor of a single, consistent reading of Moroccan law. Every road except the proximity track leads there, and that is precisely the point: one order, many doors, one law.