Marrakech – After making significant strides in digitizing various services, Morocco’s Ministry of Justice is now set to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into the court system to enhance efficiency, improve the quality of judicial work, and facilitate citizens’ access to justice, according to an official document from the ministry.
Minister of Justice Abdellatif Ouahbi, responding to a written question from an opposition group in Parliament about “the extent of the justice sector’s interaction with artificial intelligence and the development of digitizing services,” confirmed that his ministry intends to “transcribe judgments through AI-supported voice dictation.”
This will be achieved by using “a mechanism that allows automatic conversion of speech to written text, which will help judges draft judgments in less time, thus speeding up the execution of remaining judicial procedures.”
The ministry also plans to use AI to “exploit judicial precedents by facilitating access to judgments available in computer systems to help judges form a view on the cases before them,” Ouahbi said.
Using AI, the ministry aims to “record and transcribe court sessions” to “document everything that takes place in the sessions automatically, taking into account the challenges related to the Darija dialect and the Amazigh language,” highlighting that all of this falls within “the efforts made to establish a smart and integrated digital system.”
In this context, Ouahbi pointed to the Ministry of Justice’s endeavors to establish partnerships with leading international bodies in the field of AI, all in efforts to implement these projects in cooperation with the Supreme Council of the Judiciary.
Digital services
The justice minister also drew attention to the fact that the ministry has worked to create a set of electronic platforms, in order to “improve the quality of services provided to litigants and members of the judiciary.” He further listed the most prominent additions and spoke to the benefits of this digitization process.
Ouahbi also mentioned the electronic criminal record service, which digitizes criminal record requests, allowing for remote submission without the hassle of traveling to criminal record centers. The process for applying for and obtaining a nationality certificate has also been digitized, and applicants are even able to verify their identity online.
The process for paying fines for infractions and certain misdemeanors has also been digitized. For cases that have been referred to the courts and issued a court ruling, individuals can now pay their fines electronically by simply providing either their report number or national identification number.
In the context of digitizing the judicial sphere, the “National Electronic Directory of Legal and Judicial Professions,” has been created to collect data on judicial professionals in an integrated database. The minister added that it is “continuously updated and made available to the general public.”
In the context of the prison system, the ministry has created an online platform for submitting requests for pardons, conditional release and release orders for the detained. The minister stated that this platform enables “the persons concerned, their relatives, and the legally authorized entities to submit pardon and release requests in a short time, according to simplified and smooth steps.”
The Ministry of Justice also has a digital library, called “Adala,” which has a search database for legal texts, judicial precedents, decisions of the Constitutional Court, and international conventions “using a smart and multi-criteria search engine”.
The “Lawyer’s Platform for Electronic Exchange with the Courts” is a virtual office designed by the ministry for lawyers. It allows them to electronically submit documents like articles and memoranda to the courts, receive all case-related notifications electronically, and make court fee payments online. It also offers services such as obtaining copies of judgments, registering notification and enforcement requests, and tracking bank transfers for enforced payments.
‘The ministry is keeping pace with the development’
In the context of these new initiatives, Mohamed Abdelouahab Rafiqui, the advisor to the Minister of Justice, Abdellatif Ouahbi, sat down in an interview with Morocco World News (MWN).
Rafiqui told MWN that the ministry is “no stranger to interacting with and embracing all the scientific and technological advances that the world is witnessing. It was one of the pioneering ministries in digitizing a number of services.” He continued, “today, the Moroccan citizen can easily obtain a criminal record without moving from his place to the court. Today, the user can carry out a number of case procedures and view judgments remotely.”
Rafiqui added, “The digital legal office is also available today, including previous rulings and cases. Therefore, the ministry, as part of its important strategy, deals with technological progress and harnesses it to serve the citizens and their transactions.” He added that because we are living in an era of AI, “it is very natural for the ministry to keep pace with this development and employ it to serve the user and the citizen.”
“In principle, there is an agreement within the ministry to work with a leading organization in this field in order to exploit artificial intelligence, whether in recording sessions or drafting a number of reports and dictating them with voice-to-text techniques,” Rafiqui went on to say. “Judges will also be able, based on artificial intelligence, to refer to all similar previous cases and judicial precedents to help form a specific opinion on a case.”
Rafiqui noted that the ministry also intends to employ artificial intelligence in documenting court sessions and what takes place in them with great accuracy. “These are workshops that the ministry is working on, pending further progress in this field at the scientific and technological level,” he concluded.
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