ANSD : Parliament waves through key bills in first legislative session

FRI 26 - 4 - 2024

Date: Sep 25, 2018
Source: The Daily Star

Parliament waves through key bills in first legislative session

_{Timour Azhari & Hussein Dakroub| The Daily Star}
BEIRUT: Armed with consensus among the country’s major political blocs, Parliament Monday passed a raft of important bills, including a controversial waste management law and anti-corruption draft laws, in the first of a two-day legislative session.

Speaker Nabih Berri chaired the morning and evening legislative sessions, the first since a new Parliament was elected on May 6, in the presence of Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and some members of his caretaker Cabinet that raised questions from Kataeb Party chief MP Sami Gemayel on whether the ratified draft laws would become effective in the absence of a functioning government.

“The ratified draft laws will become effective and rightly so,” Berri quipped, responding to Gemayel.

In the evening session, Parliament passed a draft law on electronic transactions and personal data, as well as a judicial mediation draft law and anti-graft bills.

The e-transactions draft law was endorsed in August by joint parliamentary committees after an article of the law that would regulate the country’s domain name, and introduce a new domain level, held up the endorsement for a month.

The law was, nevertheless, passed in its entirety, with no amendments.

MPs also passed without amendments the judicial mediation law, which aims at speeding up court proceedings by referring cases to third-party mediators. The draft law was approved by joint parliamentary committees on Sept. 13.

Parliament later ratified a draft law aimed at protecting corruption whistleblowers despite opposition from several MPs. The law apparently is aimed at helping the government fight rampant corruption in the public administration.

Another bill to fight corruption in oil and gas sector contracts was passed smoothly without opposition during the evening session, after which Berri adjourned the session until 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Parliament passed a contentious waste management draft law after lengthy deliberations, overriding protests from environmental activists who called the legislation “catastrophic.” The three Kataeb MPs voted against the law.

After over two hours of discussions, MPs endorsed the law, which called for the decentralization of solid waste management and set a general framework to deal with the chronic garbage problem, while giving municipalities across Lebanon the freedom to establish incinerators, a hotly divisive issue.

A parliamentary source told The Daily Star that two articles had been removed from the draft law which was passed with 39 and not 41 articles. The Solid Waste Management law was described by lawmakers as a framework law that sets the wide legal parameters under which municipalities are allowed to develop their own decentralized ways to deal with solid waste – be it landfilling, recycling, incineration or other forms.

Speaking during the morning session, Hariri said the chance had been given to municipalities to weigh in on the law, but that only one or two had.

“I’m not a person who necessarily supports incinerators, but I also don’t want people to say that Lebanon can’t handle this technology,” he said.

Hariri’s point had previously been put forth by another lawmaker, who said that the main issue in Monday’s session seemed to be a general lack of confidence in the government’s capacity to oversee the SWM sector, rather than a more specific concern relating to incinerators or any other solution.

Hariri himself conceded the law needed some amendments – such as to do with the way it was funded – but said it should pass nonetheless.

This article dealing with the funding method was then later amended in the session, with a suggestion by Hezbollah MPs and caretaker Finance Minister Ali Hasan Khalil to entirely strike it from the bill that was to be passed.

“All the people who say there are better solutions – of course there are better ones, but someone put it forward,” Hariri said.

Disagreement emerged over an article of the law which calls for the creation of a national commission to oversee the garbage sector, and over whether it should be under the authority of the prime minister or the Environment Ministry.

Voting on a proposal to keep the proposed commission under the authority of the prime minister failed to pass, leaving it under the environment minister’s authority, the state-run National News Agency reported.

It said when the issue of financing the proposed commission was brought up, Berri strongly rejected a proposal that the caretaker Cabinet be granted exceptional powers to ensure the funds. “During the days of martyr Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, we did not grant the government exceptional powers to legislate and we will not do so today,” Berri said.

As lawmakers were in session, scores of environmental activists, who were joined by MPs Osama Saad, Paula Yacoubian and Elias Hankash, staged a sit-in near the Parliament building to denounce the waste management law, calling the legislation “catastrophic.”

Yacoubian said it would be a “catastrophe” if the law was passed. “This law does not protect our health or our environment,” she said.

The five bills passed Monday are among the 29 draft laws and proposals on the Parliament’s agenda, including projects related to the CEDRE conference and loans in millions of dollars from the World Bank.

The two-day legislative session was set amid consensus among the country’s major political blocs on the need for Parliament to convene for “legislation of necessity,” even though the Cabinet is still serving in a caretaker capacity. Any bills passed by Parliament need to be implemented by a functioning government to become effective. Two other protests also took place outside of Parliament during the legislative session.

The Committee for the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon urged for the passage of a law that would allow for the collection of biological reference data from relatives of the missing, and for the establishment of an independent national body to reveal the fate of the disappeared. The committee said in a statement that such a draft law would put an end to their suffering.

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