The various omissions and errors in the Revised Laws of Guyana need to be documented and made available alongside the revisions, according to the Head of the Bar Association, Ronald Burch-Smith.
He told Stabroek News that the Attorney General could be simultaneously compiling a comprehensive list of the omitted laws and the mistakes to ensure that persons who are purchasing the Laws of Guyana are alerted to the current state of the documentation process.
Burch-Smith said that over the course of 30 years it was not likely that there had been adequate tracking owing to the limited resources available. He agreed with the Attorney General that the revisions could not have been perfect, but said that it was imperative to document what needed to be done and to put in place corrective measures to ensure that over the course of the next 30 years the same mistakes would not be made.
He said that the Law Revision Commission would need to hire full-time staff inclusive of drafting personnel. The Head of the Bar Association
pointed to the ample array of lawyers currently looking for work, and said that since the commission was established under the Inter-American Development Bank Modernisation of Justice Administration Project, resource constraints should not be an issue.
Burch-Smith went on to allude to the fact that since the revisions were published in March, the errors had not been documented and distributed to stakeholders up to now, in addition to which the laws deliberately omitted needed to be disseminated as well, along with the regulations that would fall under those laws which were being updated.
He observed that most notably the various laws dealing with the regulation of the mining sector had been omitted because subsidiary legislation was to be included, however this had yet to be done.
For his part Attorney General Anil Nandlall has stated that the deficiencies were in the process of being corrected. He said that “law revision is a work in progress and… part of that component of the IDB-funded project was to specifically establish the commission as well as train the technical staff.” Nandlall said that prior to the revised Laws of Guyana, which were presented in March, there was no single source where all the laws to be compiled and revised were located. He described the process as long, tedious and expensive and remarked that “no one was expecting a perfect revision; it is a work in progress.”
He said that the omissions cited by analyst Christopher Ram on a recent blog, had already been identified by the technical team at the commission and corrective measures were underway.
Ram had criticized the omission of subsidiary legislation, and said that under Section 8 of the Law Revision Act, two sets of laws may be omitted. The first of these relates to a) any Appropriation or Supplementary Appropria-tion Act; b) any applied law; and c) any subsidiary legislation which the commission thinks fit to omit. The second set of laws pertains to d) any Loan Act or Loan Guarantee Act; e) any Act of a temporary nature which can, in the opinion of the commission, be conveniently omitted; and f) any act authorised by order of the President to be omitted from the laws.
Ram argued that the revised laws not only omitted items that would enable all users, including judges, magistrates and court officials, legal practitioners and the public to have a complete picture of the current laws of the country, but also failed to document some important legislation.
One of the most contentious issues involving the IDB funded project has been the cost of the volumes, which sell for $825,000. Ram has underlined the need for the attorney general’s office to account for how exactly the cost of the volumes reached such a high figure. This issue was also raised by the Bar Association. The Attorney General had earlier stated that the project was supposed to proceed on a cost recovery basis. Earlier in the year it was revealed that many lawyers were pirating copies as opposed to purchasing them.
