Government officials hope the recently launched Bahamas Government Online Initiative will clear the way for the country’s laws to be online within days.
Itﾒs considered important to help citizens and foreigners speed up their decision making for such things like investments.
Rowena Bethel, legal advisor in the Ministry of Finance, told The Bahama Journal that having access to Bahamian laws online is very important to many people, and she noted it is a citizenﾒs “God given right” to have updated access to the laws of their homeland.
Ms. Bethel noted that countries like Belize, Jamaica and Bermuda have made their laws available via the Internet for sometime, and she said she continues to receive inquiries about access to Bahamian laws online.
“What I find is that there is an enormous amount of inquiries, particularly from persons abroad wishing to have copies of the laws or being able to access the laws online to assist them in making decisions about whatever it is they wish to do here in The Bahamas,” she said.
“Itﾒs been a little bit of a difficult thing to assist them without being able to direct them to a website.”
She said making the laws available online would not require a lot of adjustment in any particular government agency, but is simply a matter of having the relevant information digitized.
“Consequently, in conjunction with the Law Reform Commission with the Attorney Generalﾒs Office we decided to [embark on that] as a project that we could produce some results in a fairly short period of time,” Ms. Bethel said.
She also pointed to significant cost savings she expects will benefit the government.
“One wants to be able to ensure that one can make this information readily available to persons on the outside than to have to go and either order a whole set of volumes for a business entity and then sending them hard copy updates every so often. [Thatﾒs] simply something that is very much in the past,” Ms. Bethel said.
She noted that in the past, the government also distributed CD-ROMS.
“They are only as current as the information at the time they were released and consequently the subsequent pieces of legislation that may have been passed by parliament were not captured in the CDs,” she added.
“Now the advantage of moving to the Internet is that you can do more immediate updates to the laws.”
Officials hope to launch the laws online initiative on July 24.
By: Stephen Gay, The Bahama Journal
