El Mahkama — The word mahkama and the buildings it | elmahkama.com
A walk through the parts of a traditional courthouse: public hall, clerk offices, judges' chambers and the records room.
A working mahkama separates four zones, and the separation is functional rather than decorative. The public waiting area is where people who are not parties to a case wait; it is the threshold between the street and the institution.
Clerks' offices sit behind that threshold. This is where paperwork is processed and where testimony is recorded — the work associated in Morocco with the adl, the judicial clerk.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Judges' chambers are private. They are the decision-making space, kept apart from both the public hall and the clerks' offices so that deliberation does not overlap with processing.
The records room is where case files are archived. Files are indexed by year and case number, because a case can be reopened years after it was first heard. The indexing scheme therefore has to support retrieval across a long time span, not just current-year filing.
The four zones together describe a workflow: people arrive, paperwork moves, a decision is made, and the file is stored in a form that can be found again years later.
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