The significant absenteeism from the House of Representatives’ voting session on the new investment charter did not go unnoticed since last week, with Rachid Talbi Alami, Speaker of the House, calling the behavior “worrying and angering.”
In a recent interview with Hespress AR, the Speaker said that “the weak attendance of members of the House of Representatives in the voting session on the draft framework law is tantamount to the investment charter.”
The vote, which took place immediately after King Mohammed VI’s speech to Parliament where he highlighted the urgency of passing the charter, disappointed the Speaker, who revealed to Hespress AR that new measures against absenteeism will be undertaken.
The House of Representatives comprised 395 members, of whom only one-third attended and two-thirds were absent.
“The weak interaction of members of the House of Representatives with this project worried me a little, but on the other hand, we must take into account that some of the representatives’ presence was made impossible due to antiCOVID precautionary measures.
However, these measures will now come to an end, says the Speaker, explaining that the precautionary measures stage ended with the presence of the King for the opening and the presence of all parliamentarians, which means that we have have returned to normal life,” after years of special circumstance due to the pandemic.
“We work according to the law, along with moral and commitment obligations,” said Alami, adding that these obligations are manifested in the parliamentarians’ presence to defend national interests within the legislative institution, not just their political groups or stay in their communes and provinces.
“If the parliamentarian prefers to work in the group that he chairs and abandons his national duties as a representative of the nation, then the problem here lies in framing and training, more than in the law,” stressed the Speaker.
Alami pointed out that the organizational law of the House of Representatives came to approve the state of incompatibility between the membership of the Council and bearing the responsibility of chairing the collective councils of major cities.
The legislation stipulated moving the procedure for stripping the membership of the Council in the event of absence from the Council’s work for a year without an excuse, indicating that the House of Representatives office will resort to applying the requirements of the internal system against absentees without laxism.
Alami indicated that the draft internal system review will adopt new procedures in this regard, which will include “reciting the names of the absent deputies in the plenary sessions.”
A measure he judges “sufficient to inform the public of who attends and performs his duties, and who does not attend and does not perform his duties, so that even the citizen is aware and familiar with the representatives who carry out their duties and those who do not come at all.”
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