Legal Draftsman laments Most Govt Ministries don’t know what they are about!

By Ravi Ladduwahetty-2018-01-07

confusion worse confounded that's what these ministerial officers seem to be, utterly undecided, changing policies at their whim and fancy, requiring each draft to be amended a record 20-25 times.
They make it into a crazy chaotic frustrating process which could drive one up the wall, Legal Draftsman Deepani Sandhya Hewa Kumarajeewa, let out her exasperation in an interview with Ceylon Today on Friday morning when she said: "Most ministries know not what they are about!"

"Look at the National Audit Bill. We had to amend the Draft a record 22 times, simply because the Auditor-General's Department, a non-Ministerial Department of the Government, kept on changing our Draft with changes in the Government policy, each time we finalized the Draft Bill with the requisite changes," she spelt out in disdain.

This keeps happening with most of the Government Ministries too. There have been umpteen numbers of times where we have kept on accompanying the changes that those Ministries have sent us. They are not required to do any drafting. All they have to do is to send us the Policy Statements pertaining to that Ministry and we do the drafting. But it is really annoying when they keep on adding and deleting the government policies each time we finalize the drafts, she remarked.

These are some of the ground realities that she has published in the Annual Report, in her candid and lucid explanation of the constraints and drawbacks which confront her job. She also said that due to the constraints of adequate resource personnel in her department, she is forced to carry her work home.

The Legal Draftsman also sees this as a arduous constraint when the Draft Bills require the mandatory clause of having them in the two official languages which are Sinhalese and Tamil and there are the cascading effects of the delays in finalizing these Bills when the Policies are changed every now and then, she lamented.

"The tragedy of the episode is that there are a mere eight Senior Officers in the Department and 19 junior officers and two translators. They are also gradually leaving in search of better employment elsewhere due to overworked and underpaid," she said.

"The Junior Officers are not reliable all the time and they have to be supervised by the Senior Officers. It is I who has to supervise them as well and this is an extremely arduous exercise and especially when the Bills have to be drafted over and over again making us work day and night on it," she further said.

Some of the other Draft Bills which have been passed in Parliament have been the Motor Traffic Bill and the Kotelawela Defence University Bill and a few others which include some on NGOs as well.

The other Bills amended more than ten times and are yet to be finalized include the State Land (Special Provisions) Bill (13 times), the Land Development Ordinance (14 times), the General Sir John Kotelawala National Defence University Bill (10 times), the Sri Lanka Sustainable Development Bill (15 times) and the Voluntary Social Service (Registration and Supervision) Bill (11 times), she said in disgust.