Evidence-based legislative design, common standards and guidelines, free access to online legislation, ICTs as critical tools to enable open access to laws and sharing of experience. These are among the main issues discussed on the occasion of the workshop “Building Capacity for Legislative Drafting in Africa”, organized by the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) and the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel (CALC-Africa Region) in Cape Town, South Africa, on 4-5 July 2012.
The regional workshop, kindly hosted by the APKN Secretariat, the Parliament of South Africa in collaboration with CALC-Africa and supported by the Africa i-Parliament Action Plan of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA), saw the participation of over ninety representatives from African parliaments and government departments to discuss how legislative drafting should evolve in order to successfully face the challenges and growing needs of modern societies and how ICTs may support their work and meet these challenges.
The different sessions focused on the use of evidence-based legislative drafting and the importance of having standards for legislative drafting. It also highlighted the importance for drafters and legal counsel to benefit from the opportunities that open semantic standards, like Akoma Ntoso, offer in terms of more efficient legislative processes, access to legislation and long time preservation.
At the end of the workshop, participants agreed upon the need to build, through a collaborative approach, those capacities essential to master new tools and methodologies. Consequently, there was a shared appreciation on the following initiatives:
Over the next months, APKN and CALC-Africa will continue to cooperate in order to jointly implement these and other such initiatives.
an initative of United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA)