The Tangier Bar Association has a distinguished history, a prominent presence, and is reconciled with its past while looking towards a promising future.
This century-old institution enriches the institutional framework of our country, encompassing legal, professional, human rights, and advocacy aspects. It plays a vital and effective role in the national project aimed at establishing, consolidating, and enhancing the pillars of a state governed by the rule of law. Through this, it serves as a partner in ensuring the independence of the judiciary and its authority in issuing its orders, judgments, and decisions, which embody the truth in their just titles of justice and rights.
This venerable and historic association has produced a distinguished group of lawyers who have carried out their message and profession with legal pride, noble activism, and professional competence. Their reputation is well-regarded in every corner of the courtrooms and the judicial palace they have passed through, protecting the rights of citizens as litigants and ensuring defendants receive a fair trial and equitable application of the law. It has nurtured exceptional individuals who have consciously and responsibly contributed to reform and change projects, forming an elite that has fought for a Morocco that embraces all its children—a Morocco of equality, equal opportunity, and fair wealth distribution, aiming for the true establishment of a modern democratic and developmental society.
A clear example of this is the late Professor Abderrahman Yousfi, who was a prominent member of the Tangier Bar Association. A leftist activist rooted in the nationalist movement, he led the opposition Socialist Union party. He accepted the late King Hassan II’s proposal to form a government of consensus during a critical and challenging historical period, prioritizing national interests over partisan ones. This demonstrated, may God rest his soul, a high sense of patriotism and reflected the nobility and ethics of a lawyer, embodying the principles of a statesman with a strategic vision that ultimately triumphs for the stability of society and its supreme interests.
The association also includes the late Professor Abdeslam Blakiwi, a prominent rights activist who chaired the Moroccan Bar Associations’ federation. Under his leadership, the federation flourished, addressing not only purely professional or cultural aspects but extending its focus to human rights, political, and national affairs, particularly concerning the constitution. The federation contributed significantly with a compelling argument presented to the royal committee at the Academy of the Kingdom in Rabat, where he emphasized human rights and the section concerning the judiciary, resulting in the acceptance of all the federation’s proposals.
Currently, the Bar Association in Tangier is headed by Mr. Anwar Boulouki, a young rights activist who has honed his advocacy skills at the Northern Morocco Human Rights Forum—an organization that embraced a regional vision. Many of his ideas and advocacy program have been adopted at the highest levels of government and state projects, which now consider regional characteristics to achieve spatial justice and development plans to address the exclusion and marginalization that the Rif region has suffered for many years.
Mr. Boulouki is known for his high human sensitivity and professional outlook, which champions the legal profession in its essence, aligning with the guarantee of freedom of opinion and expression, and institutionalizing the defense message constitutionally. He is also committed to protecting the dignity of lawyers and their right to a suitable and sound environment. His methodology is based on proximity and openness to everyone, alongside a strategic vision that rises above personalization and elevates the institution, necessitating discipline and the engagement of council members with an elevated vision that embodies modernity and progressiveness in meaning, structure, action, and outcomes.
The Tangier Bar Association, with its commendable national history and the foundational force of its norms and traditions, solidifies the profession of pride and rights—the noble profession of defending the supremacy of law and the virtue of justice represented by its elite lawyers, both leaders and youth. All of these factors inspire hope for a promising future in which the practice of law and lawyers in the Tangier Bar Association can be recognized for their humanity and professionalism, characterized by equality and equal opportunities, assuming a pioneering role within society.
By: Professor Abdelhamid Abbas, Lawyer at the Tangier Bar Association.
