Attorney General, Adriel Brathwaite (left), with members of the IROSOFT team.
Laws online by year-end
5/11/2012
THE updated laws of Barbados will be available to the public online by the end of 2012.
This was announced yesterday evening by Attorney General and Minister of Home Affairs, Adriel Brathwaite, at a ceremony at his Wildey offices.
The new Legislation Implementation and Management System (LIMS) has been a year in the making with a team from the Solicitor General’s Office and a consultant team, IROSOFT from Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
According to Chief Parliamentary Counsel, Shirley Bell, the new system will ensure that that office fulfils its mandate in a more timely fashion. She explained that currently, the only way to access the legislation is via hard copies, which are constantly lagging behind by a year or more. She said that ultimately, the LIMS is a quicker and more reliable way of updating the laws of this country.
Attorney General Brathwaite maintained that the benefits to be derived from the new system should be embraced, adding that users of the laws, as well as the general public, will have easy access to the updated versions of the laws of Barbados.
“We intend as far as possible to have a paperless Parliament and this is part of our solution… Also, as for the ordinary man in the street, he is expected to know the laws of Barbados, but he does not have a volume of laws available to him… He will in the next couple of months via the web to have access to all of the laws of Barbados,” Brathwaite said.
He added that the LIMS will also prove beneficial to international users of Barbadian services, as they will be able to access up-to-date copies of Barbadian legislation.
The Attorney General added that Barbados is leading the way in terms of online access to legislation, especially in the area of updating, where other countries will update the online legislation every two years, as opposed to the intention of Barbados to update it every quarter. (AN)
