Turning Policy into Legislation

Seminar

Date: Tuesday 23 November 2021

Time: 13.15 – 15.00

Location: Stockholm Center for Commercial Law, Stockholm University, Frescati and on Zoom

Welcome to an advanced seminar on the topic of “Turning Policy into Legislation: Strengthening Rule of Law by Adopting A Uniform Mechanism of Legislative Drafting” with Malik Junaid Arshad.

Pakistan Legislative Drafting process has been taken as case study.

The Legal framework for legislative drafting addresses many legal challenges, including turning policy into legislation, the intelligibility of legislative expression, interpretation of statutes, and the rule of law. It leads the administration of justice towards achieving desired policy objectives. Without a predictable legislative drafting legal framework, the drafting quality causes failure to achieve desired policy objective, lack of rule of law, ambiguity, unintelligibility, and unpredictability of legislation. However, it is equally true that many of these challenges are prevalent to a large in various democracies, to prove the hypothesis drafting process in Pakistan has been taken as a case study. The deficiency of legislative drafting regulatory practices, expertise, and deficient legislative expression impedes the enforcement of laws and administration of justice, it caused diverse interpretation hence hurdle for rule of law that required intelligibility, clarity, transparency and predictability in draft legislation.

It is quite apparent that the legislative drafting problems faced in the heterogeneous society of Pakistan appear to be similar in many other countries. The study exposes the necessity to adopt, special procedures, policies, and infrastructure for legislative drafting based on internationally recognized principles for intelligible, clear, and predictable legislation to strengthen rule of law.

Theoretical Framework

G.C Thornton legislative drafting process and Tom Bingham’s first principle of rule of law has been linked and taken as theoretical framework.  

Malik Junaid Arshad is active at the Department of Law at Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan, and is currently a guest researcher at Stockholm University.
 

Registration and link to Zoom

Coffee and light refreshments will be served for those who are in place at SCCL. Please inform Maria Nääv of your participation by 20 November: maria.naav@juridicum.su.se

On Zoom you can join us through the following link: 
https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/65874288322?pwd=ZXpLMnJ4bWxRdHl5c3JSUTFzRnBFZz09
Meeting ID: 658 7428 8322, Passcode: SCCL
 

 / Mauro Zamboni, Torben Spaak and Maria Nääv