Amit Shah stresses on skill in legislative drafting

New Delhi [India], May 15 : Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday emphasized the need to study old and least controversial laws during the process of converting government policies into laws.
He said, "Writing is a skill and punctuation marks should be used with great care and skill in legislative drafting."
Amit Shah said, "While writing the law, one should not hesitate to express the intention of the Legislature clearly, without ambiguity, in simple and clear words."
Shah's remarks came while inaugurating a training program on Legislative Drafting organized by the Institute of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies (ICPS) in collaboration with the Parliamentary Research and Training Institute for Democracies (PRIDE) for officers of Parliament, state legislatures, various ministries, statutory bodies and other government departments in the national capital.
In his address, Shah said, "Legislative drafting is a crucial component of our democracy and lack of knowledge about it not only weakens the laws but the entire democratic system and it also affects the functioning of the judiciary."
"It is very important for any democratic country that its legislative drafting skills keep upgrading and becoming more efficient with time," he further remarked.
"The Constitution of India is considered to be the most perfect Constitution in the world and the people who framed it not only incorporated the country's traditional democratic values but also tried to modernize it according to the needs of contemporary times," Shah added.
According to Shah, there are three main pillars of democracy - Legislature, Executive and Judiciary and our Constitution framers built our entire democratic governance system on these three pillars.
Shah said, "The function of the Legislative Department is to formulate the political will of the Parliament and the Union Cabinet into law."
"The function of the Legislative Department is to provide a legal format to the political will and ways to solve the problems of the people and different needs of the country and for this reason, drafting attains great importance," he added.
"If the drafting is better, it will be easier to educate about the law with minimal chances of errors by the executive. If grey areas are left in the drafting, it would lead to encroachment in interpretation, while, if the drafting is complete and lucid, its interpretation would also be clear," Shah said.
Noting that the Parliament is the most powerful organ of the government and its strength is the law, Shah said, "Legislative drafting is the most important method of governing any country in a good way."
Shah later said, "While translating Parliament's and people's will into law, many things have to be taken into account, such as the Constitution, customs, culture, historical heritage, structure of governance, society, Socio-Economic Development of the country and International Treaties.
"Legislative Drafting is not a science or an art, but it is a skill which has to be used with spirit. The focus should always be on minimizing the grey areas and the law should be clear. During the process of converting government policies into laws, it is necessary to study the old and least controversial laws," he added.
"Writing is a skill and punctuation marks should be used with great care and skill in legislative drafting," Shah noted.
Apart from this, Shah said, "The draftsman should also have a good command over language because it is very important to reflect the spirit of our language. Every language has a limit and mere translation of the words will not work, but the translation of the spirit should be done."
Pointing out that capacity building is a continuous process, Shah said "It is very important to upgrade the skills of the law-drafting team in every department of the Parliament, state legislature of the states."
"The world is changing very fast and we have to keep pace with the changing world and also mould our laws according to the needs of today. If we are not so open, we will become obsolete and irrelevant," he remarked.
"Drafting should be done in as simple and clear words as possible because a law drafted in cliched words always creates controversy. The more simple and clear the law is in words, the more it remains undisputed," he added.
Shah said that making such a law that the court does not need to intervene is a medal for drafting a good law, and that "our aim should be to draft the law in simple and clear language."
Shah said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has worked a lot in the field of laws and since 2015 till now it has done the work of repealing thousands of irrelevant laws.
He said, "By doing this, the government led by Prime Minister Modi, has done the work of liberating the lawyers, society and courts from the jungle of laws."
"The government led by PM Modi has also enacted many laws in accordance with the time in the interest of the country," Shah added.
Several dignitaries including Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Union Minister Pralhad Joshi, Arjun Ram Meghwal, and Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla were present on the occasion.