Prescription and Time Limits in the Moroccan DOC
If you are waiting to be paid, or if someone is demanding an old debt from you, time is not neutral: it wipes out rights. In Morocco, the Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) sets time limits beyond which one can no longer bring a court action. Understanding these limits means knowing until when you are protected, and from when you no longer are.
The essentials in brief
Prescription extinguishes the action arising from an obligation after the time fixed by law [1]. The ordinary time limit is fifteen years [3], but many claims become time-barred far more quickly: five, two, or one year depending on the trade and the nature of the debt [11]. The starting point is the day on which the right is acquired [5]. A court claim or an acknowledgment by the debtor interrupts the period and restarts it from zero [7][9]. Beware: the judge cannot raise prescription on their own; you must invoke it [2].
What "prescription" really means
Two things are often confused: losing one's right, and losing the means of asserting it. The extinctive prescription of the DOC concerns the second. Once the legal time limit has passed, the court action that arises from the obligation is extinguished [1]. The debt, to a certain extent, survives; but the creditor no longer has the judicial lever to recover it.
This extinction is not automatic. It does not operate "as of right": it must be invoked by the person who has an interest in it, that is, in practice, the debtor being pursued [2]. And here is the rule that surprises people the most: the judge cannot raise the plea of prescription of their own motion [2]. In other words, if you are sued for a claim that is plainly time-barred but you say nothing, the court may well rule against you. Prescription is a weapon; you still have to draw it.
If an old debt is being demanded of you, your first reflex must be to raise prescription, in writing, before the court of first instance.
The ordinary time limit: fifteen years
The basic rule is simple. All actions arising from an obligation are time-barred after fifteen years, except for the exceptions provided by law [3]. This is the general safety net: in the absence of a shorter time limit applicable to your situation, you have fifteen years to act, and your opponent has fifteen years before being in the clear.
This time limit cannot be extended by agreement. The parties may not, through a clause in their contract, lengthen prescription beyond the fifteen years fixed by law [4]. You cannot, therefore, stipulate in advance that a claim will remain enforceable for twenty or thirty years: such a clause would have no effect.
Keep this figure as your default benchmark, then always check whether a shorter special time limit exists.
Short prescriptions: one, two, five years
The DOC sharply shortens the time limits for a whole series of claims linked to a professional activity. It is Article 388 that sets out the list [11].
Time-barred after five years are supplies made by a merchant, supplier, or manufacturer to another professional, for the needs of their profession [11].
Time-barred after two years are, in particular, the fees of doctors, surgeons, dentists, and veterinarians for their care, medicines supplied by pharmacists, the bills of architects, engineers, and experts, as well as supplies made by merchants to private individuals for their domestic use [11].
Time-barred after one year of three hundred and sixty-five days are the fees of teachers, the wages of domestic servants, the salaries and commissions of workers, employees, and commercial agents, the bills of hoteliers for lodging and food, and the rental price of furniture [11].
There are other one-year time limits: the action for rescission, for example, is time-barred after one year in all cases where the law does not indicate a different period [12]. These short prescriptions are formidable. A professional invoice left unclaimed for two years can become irrecoverable when one thought it was protected for fifteen years.
For such claims, do not let things drag on: send your reminders and, if necessary, act before the special time limit expires.
When the time limit begins to run
The time limit does not start from the day of signing or from the abstract birth of the debt: it runs from the day on which the right is acquired [5]. As long as you cannot yet act, the clock stays frozen.
The DOC draws several concrete consequences from this [5]. Prescription does not run against a conditional right as long as the condition has not been fulfilled. It does not run against a warranty action as long as the eviction has not occurred. It does not run against an action subject to a term before that term has expired. Nor does it run against absent persons, until the declaration of absence and the appointment of a curator, nor where the creditor was under a factual impossibility to act within the time limit [5].
The calculation itself is made by whole days and not by hours. The day that serves as the starting point is not counted, and prescription is completed when the last day of the term has expired [6]. A subtlety, but one that can decide the fate of a case won or lost by a single day.
Precisely date the moment when you were first able to act: that is where everything is counted from.
Suspension: when the clock pauses
Certain situations freeze prescription without restarting it: the time already elapsed remains acquired, but the counter stops as long as the obstacle lasts. This is notably the case of factual impossibility to act, which the DOC ranks among the causes preventing prescription from running [5].
The code also protects certain relationships. No prescription takes place between spouses during the marriage, between parents and their children, nor between an incapable person (or the habous, or a legal entity) and their guardian, curator, or administrator, as long as the mandate has not ended and the accounts have not been definitively rendered [10]. The logic is clear: one cannot require someone to sue their spouse or their child in order to interrupt a time limit.
If a family relationship or a guardianship is involved, check that the time limit has indeed begun to run before concluding that a claim is time-barred.
Interruption: resetting the counter to zero
Interruption goes further than suspension: it wipes out the time elapsed and opens a new full time limit [9]. When prescription is validly interrupted, the time run up to the interrupting act no longer counts, and a new period starts again from the moment that act ceases to produce effect [9].
How to interrupt? The DOC first targets the creditor's acts: any judicial or extra-judicial demand bearing a certain date that puts the debtor in default to perform, even before an incompetent judge or even if the act is annulled for a defect of form; the demand for admission of the claim in the debtor's bankruptcy; or a protective or enforcement act on their property [7].
Interruption may also come from the debtor themselves. Any act by which they acknowledge the creditor's right interrupts prescription: a settled account, the payment of an installment resulting from an act bearing a certain date, a request for time to pay, the provision of a surety or a guarantee, or the raising of a set-off [8].
This is the creditor's most powerful tool. A demand for payment bearing a certain date, properly drafted, can save a claim on the brink of extinction.
References
[1] Article 371 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [2] Article 372 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [3] Article 387 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [4] Article 375 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [5] Article 380 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [6] Article 386 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [7] Article 381 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [8] Article 382 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [9] Article 383 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [10] Article 378 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [11] Article 388 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC) [12] Article 311 — Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC)
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