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Ordinances Placed Before Parliament

By Adnan Karim

The new government has placed 122 ordinances before the parliament. Unless passed within 30 days of the first parliamentary session, those ordinances promulgated by the President during the caretaker government's two year tenure would become automatically ineffective. Some of the ordinances would be placed as bills and would be passed in the usual way. Some of the ordinances would be ratified as they stand now. The third group of ordinances will be left to become ineffective after 30 days.

The government is now considering ways to validate the immediate past care taker government itself since they have been in office for around two years whereas they were suppose to stay for three months. Although a High Court Division bench has validated holding of the general election after a long delay, it is not enough however to regularize the Caretaker government itself. The media reports that Parliament is now considering amending the Constitution to validate the Caretaker government. In my opninoin, this should have been done by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh under the court's advisory jurisdiction under Article 106 as soon as the three month tenure of the government was over. The problem faced fits perfectly to the criteria stated in Article 106. It is still possible and that would have been the best way of doing it.

Bangladesh had ample experience with extra-judicial governments during its 38 years existence and therefore there will be no shortage of past precedence to look into to solve this problem. However, the uniquness of the current situation makes it a bit difficult to reach the best solution specially because the implications will have far reaching political and legal consequences.

Although the government wants to validate the care taker government's extended existence and its actions, it does not want to encourage future repeatation of a similar kind.

Full post as published by Law Chronicles Online on February 08, 2009 (boomark / email).