03.02.09

The Duma will expand the powers and authorities of the Public Chamber. According to the amendments proposed to the Duma rules, deputies would be obligated to send all draft laws that they are considering for expert appraisal to Public Chamber representatives. Experts do not understand what the Public Chamber has been doing for the past 2 years.

Presumably, on Wednesday, 28 January, the State Duma will consider a draft amendment to its rules, according to which all draft laws submitted to the lower house of parliament will be forwarded to the Public Chamber for preliminary expert appraisal.

The fact is that, according to the existing procedure, members of the Public Chamber receive draft laws only after requisitioning them, and this happens very rarely.

In fact, the Public Chamber practically does not participate in adoption of laws by the Duma.

The amendments were prepared by the profile-related Committee on Rules and Organization of Work of the State Duma, reports the press service of the United Russia faction.

However, a member of the committee, Communist Valeriy Rashkin, assured Gazeta.Ru that the proposal was prepared by the President's Staff as part of the implementation of the Message to the Federal Assembly, and was not discussed in the committee.

In his 5 November Message to the Federal Assembly, Dmitriy Medvedev cited "the need to take additional measures to involve representatives of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation in the lawmaking process" among the points of his political reform.

Members of the Public Chamber had raised the question of preliminary expert appraisal of draft laws back on 19 March in the course of the meeting with the then newly elected president.

Not everyone in the Duma approves of expanding the powers and authorities of the Public Chamber. The CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) faction condemned the initiative, Rashkin insists.

"This is a distraction from the State Duma's day-to-day work: The expert appraisal of draft laws will be performed by non-professionals, who have no legal education," Rashkin believes.

Furthermore, in his opinion, an expert appraisal will slow down the process of adopting laws even more.

After adoption of the amendments, the volume of work of the Public Chamber must drastically increase. The fact is that, in the Fall session of 2008 alone, the State Duma deputies reviewed 467 draft laws, and almost as many were submitted to the chamber. The 126 members of the Public Council may encounter such a volume of work.

However, a member of the Public Chamber, Genri Reznik, explained to Gazeta.Ru that the chamber would not review all draft laws, but only those on which it wants to perform an expert appraisal.

The Public Chamber would be given specific times for appraising an initiative, and the deputies would have to consider the conclusion in the course of their discussions at the plenary sessions. Reznik explained the need for the new procedure by the fact that, for example, certain draft laws were adopted "at a sprinter's tempo," and the Public Chamber could not subject them to expert appraisal in time for technical reasons.

"This was the case, for example, with the shameful draft law on repeal of jury trials for certain categories of cases," the member of the Public Chamber cited an example.

But now, Public Chamber members will have more time and opportunities to appraise legislative initiatives.

"The Public Chamber was initially devised as a consultative body and, if the need has now arisen for certain amendments so that this body begins to function, it turns out that, up until now, the Public Chamber had not engaged in expert appraisals and had existed for 2 years without fulfilling its main functions," independent political Dmitriy Oreshkin says in surprise. In essence, the Public Chamber is an attempt at creating a single bureaucratic body for control of another bureaucratic body, he believes.

"Ultimately, this will result in the fact that draft laws will have their own lobbyists also in the Public Chamber," Oreshkin predicts.

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Source: Gazeta.ru