Suwaibou Touray, Chairperson Of NA Select Committee On Public Petitions
By Ramatoulie Jawo
Photo Caption: Suwaibou Touray, Chairperson Of NA Select Committee On Public Petitions
The Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) on Friday launched a two-day seminar on post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) for National Assembly Members. The seminar is aimed at strengthening the legislative and oversight functions of the Assembly.
Post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) is a relatively new concept and practice of monitoring how laws are implemented and evaluating their impact. The aim of PLS is to ensure that laws benefit citizens as originally intended by lawmakers. The seminar on PLS is part of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s (WFD) support to strengthen the human and institutional capacity of the National Assembly.
At the opening ceremony, Madi Jobarteh, the country representative of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), said that Post Legislative Scrutiny (PLS) is an opportunity to make parliament more effective, relevant, and responsive to the needs of the people. He also said that PLS can help to enhance good governance.
Mr. Jobarteh noted that many people in the Gambia complain that the country is good at making laws, but that the implementation of those laws is often lacking. He said that PLS can help to address this problem by providing parliament with a mechanism to review and assess the effectiveness of laws after they have been passed.
“PLS does not only help us to determine if the law is being implemented or not. But also, it tells us if the laws are good or bad because of their impacts on society. In other words, PLS is a mechanism to determine if institutions are performing as per the law and if the law itself is responsive to the need of the people as intended by the lawmakers,” he said.
Mr. Jobarteh said that the Post Legislative Scrutiny (PLS) mechanism allows members of the National Assembly to conduct special fact-finding exercises to review the implementation of laws. This is done by engaging with relevant institutions, organizations, communities, and individuals who are beneficiaries of the laws, in order to understand the impact of the laws on them.
Hon. Suwaibou Touray, the National Assembly Member for Wuli East and Chairman of the Select Committee on Public Petition, expressed his gratitude to the Westminster Foundation (WFD) for their continuous support of parliament.
Touray said that WFD is always responsive to the key needs of the National Assembly, and that the two-day seminar they organized was very important for parliamentarians.
He explained that the objective of the seminar was to improve legislative scrutiny, which is essential for ensuring that laws are passed and implemented effectively.
“So, to give us any opportunity to discuss all these things fully will be helpful. Why are all those laws not implemented, and why do we make laws and not implemented? What is responsive, we need to find them out, so we will be able to make every effort to see that they are implemented, or we revoke them. Because any law that has not been implemented is not law,” he said.