What is it
AKOMA NTOSO 2.0 Schema
Document Actions
All content on one page (useful for printing, presentation mode etc.)
Rationale
In order for legislation to be better
understood and correctly implemented, it is essential to ensure that it
is well drafted. Acts adopted by the institutions must be drawn up in
an intelligible and consistent manner, in accordance with uniform
principles of presentation and legislative drafting, so that citizens
and economic operators can identify their rights and obligations and
the courts can enforce them.
The need for better lawmaking — by
clearer, simpler acts complying with principles of good legislative
drafting — has been recognised as a strategic component to move toward
the rule of law and good governance.
Legal systems, and in
particular legislation, are getting more and more complex and each
National Parliament has to coordinate and adopt legal texts that come
from regional parliamentary assemblies and soon from PAP as its statute
foresees legislative powers from the second term. New acts and amending
acts end up creating layers of legislation that cannot be handled
effectively though paper documents. National legislation has to take
into account international sources which create a complex system of
rights and references. Under such conditions, Parliaments while
legislating have to deal with ever intricate bodies of legislation. The
process of drafting consistent and coherent legislation is getting more
complicated, as it is the task of upholding and applying valid law by
the judiciary.
At the same time we are currently witnessing the
transition from paper to digital documents/records and the
unprecedented opportunity that this can bring into the legal domain.
ICTs can provide parliaments, judiciaries, enterprises and citizens
with the tools to effectively manage increasing bodies of laws and
regulations and provide access to information in a way that really
satisfies the needs of the people, enterprises and institutions.
The
achievement of these objectives will not be possible without adopting
common guidelines on the language and structure of legal documents and
cross-references as well as shared standards for markup of legal
information, covering the whole life-cycle of the legal documents and
classification tools.
General guidelines, shared best practices
and common standards are needed to address different aspects of legal
information life-cycle management covering:
- Legal Drafting Guidelines: there is the need to agree on uniform drafting guidelines dealing with the structural elements of legislation, so that such elements can be automatically identified and processed. In particular, the precise drafting of textual modification enables the updating of legal texts to be automated. The Guide will be modelled on the very appreciated and praised “Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission”.
- Markup Framework (XML schemas): there is the need to provide a set of guidelines for marking legal and parliamentary documents with in machine readable tags, according to appropriate technical policies and specifications.
- Data Modelling
(Knowledge): there is the need to define rich representations of legal
knowledge, in order to capture its essential components, so that,
appropriate mappings and legal conceptualisations can be applied in
understanding and retrieving laws.
Developing Africa-wide shared standards
for legal knowledge modelling, that will allow to exploit huge
potentialities of ICTs in the legal domain, will empower the civil
society and public administration by providing them with the means and
ways to make legal information and knowledge widely available by
increasing accessibility of African laws, decisions, and legal data
over the Internet. ICTs can in fact improve and automate all the
life-cycle of the legislative documentation and provide computer- and
internet-based support to legislative process throughout its different
phases from drafting to enactment and subsequent management of the
life-cycle including consolidation of amendments and point-in-time
legislation.
The process will be participatory, will involve the
collaboration and contributions of African Parliaments and African
University and scholars. The outcome of this process, the “Practical
Drafting Guidelines for Africa” and a first version of the “Legal
Drafting Code for Africa” will be presented and discussed at the
International Conference “African Legal Resources: Challenges and
Opportunities of Legislative Informatics”, organised by the National
Assembly of Nigeria and UNITED NATIONS Department of Economic and
Social Affairs programme “Africa i-Parliament Action Plan”, February,
2006, under the aegis of the PAP Africa Parliament.