ON behalf of the Chairman of Constitutional and Law Reform Commission, Hon. Saki Soloma, Commissioner Martha Kokiva has launched CLRC’s third monograph on theReview of the Colonial Laws of Papua New Guinea recently.
The report provides an up-to-date status of all the colonial or adopted laws the country introduced before Independence 1975.The report is important for two reasons.
It provides historical context within which the pre-independence laws were adopted and justify why these laws needed to be reformed. The report also guides the Commission and the Government to reform colonial laws identified in this report in a coordinated manner.
“This report will provide a clear guidance for both the CLRC and other implementing State agencies to review these old foreign laws in a focused and coordinated manner in keeping in tune with the country’s development progress and future, and in the spirit of PNG Ways,” Commissioner Kokiva said.
The report highlighted that between 1975 and March 2020, PNG has adopted 480 colonial laws from Australia. Twenty-eight of those laws have been repealed without replacement; 12 have been merged with other laws, and 123 were repealed and replaced by new Acts.
The report also states that there were other reviews either already been done, in progress or proposed to be undertaken by others. After all the deductions, PNG now has 199 colonial laws yet to be reviewed. This begs the question of how these laws can be reviewed and reformed in line with the priority under the PNG Vision 2050.
Review of the colonial laws is one of the important processes that the Constitutional Framers had in mind before Independence, to fully decolonize PNG from its colonial past.
Two other processes include recording or codification of the custom and case law development by the Courts. These processes which are under the mandate of CLRC, must lead to the development of the country’s indigenous legal system — something the Constitutional Framers could not do because of time and capacity constraints.
This report emanated from a direction from the CLRC Commissioners in 2013 as a response to the call by the government at that time for each government agency to contribute to the realization of Vison 2050.
