AG’s office undertakes new process for drafting of legislations |10 January 2020
AG Frank Ally
The office of the Attorney General has, of this year, embarked on a new legislative programme process with the aim of ensuring that government’s legislations are drafted and submitted in a more organised manner.
Attorney General Frank Ally yesterday explained that, in order to develop a legislative programme for 2020, his legal officers undertook an exercise in the last quarter of 2019 to assess and collect the legislative needs of ministries and some government agencies.
These were then compiled in a legislative programme for 2020 which provides details of all bills and regulations, along with their deadlines, which should be drafted and submitted before the cabinet of ministers and the National Assembly throughout this year.
The programme was subsequently presented to and approved by cabinet during a meeting chaired by President Danny Faure on Wednesday.
Mr Ally acknowledged that it is the first time during his two-year tenure that cabinet has been presented with a comprehensive list of the legislations that are to be drafted and submitted during the year.
“We have always had, to some extent, a legislative programme but for this year we wanted to brief cabinet and the President with all the laws that the ministries want and which we have to work with them to get drafted, completed and published.”
It is also the first time that the AG’s office goes about developing its legislative programme by actively reaching out and discussing with ministries and public agencies.
Mr Ally noted that their previous way of doing things was disorganised and therefore less efficient than this new process.
He expressed that this new process will facilitate the work of the AG’s office since it now has an action plan for 2020 and no longer has to wait for the ministries to come to them at random periods during the year to draft or amend a bill, or draw up new regulations.
“In our discussions with the President, who is also the minister for legal affairs, we determined that we should be more strategic in regards to how we prepare legislations,” he explained.
“Often we get this ad hoc request to prepare legislations for ministries and departments but this time we have gone to each of them to ascertain their needs. This is because we felt that certain ministries and departments often do not know how to approach us or how to tackle certain amendments to their existing laws, or if to draft a whole new one. We wanted to reach out to them instead of them coming to us.”
For 2020, his office expects to deal with a total of 50 new legislations as well as some of 20 legislations from previous years that remain pending.
Top on the 2020 legislative programme list are legislations dealing with Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) – since Seychelles is striving to meet international AML/CFT standards -, legislations in regards to the recent Constitutional review as well as the Elections amendment bill.
Elsie Pointe