THE Ministry of Justice together with the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) last week formally launched a partnership to ensure the long-term sustainability of Namibian laws online.
The partnership will be between the ministry’s NamibLII platform and the Legal Assistance Centre, which has been producing three legal databases for the past few years, called Namlex.
Namlex is a list of laws in force in Namibia, organised according to topic, with brief descriptions of each law.
It was initiated by the late advocate Anton Lubowski in 1988, which the LAC continued after his death.
This database includes all statutes and post-independence regulations in force in Namibia as amended.
Minister of justice Yvonne Dausab said there has been an unofficial partnership between the two institutions since 2015, with some staff members being trained in the detailed process of updating the annotated laws, which were initially prepared on commission to the Namibian parliament, and ensuring their accuracy.
She said the updated laws were shared and uploaded onto the NamibLII platform in 2017.
NamibLII is part of the Legal Information Institute family.
Namibia is one of 15 African countries with an LII. Many other countries, such as Canada and Australia, also prefer making access to justice possible via the LII platforms, Dausab said.
“Since then great strides have been taken behind the scenes to enable the partnership launch. The ministry has been putting both human and capital resources in place to populate and refine the NamibLII website, as the provision of legal information to the public is in accordance with the mandate of the ministry of making justice accessible to the people,” she said.
Dausab said the partnership unites the expertise of both the non-government organisation (NGO) sector and the government to advance public knowledge of the law – thereby advancing the rule of law in Namibia.
“I am driven by the passion of the team working together on this partnership, convinced of the importance of providing citizens with easy-to-read, accurate access to legal information,” she said.
The LAC’s Dianne Hubbard said by partnering with the government they will be transferring skills and ensuring that the project is sustainable in the long term.
“We want to have every Government Gazette that has been published in Namibia available online ultimately. We have already from 1994, so now we are doing the pre-independence one, because our legal history matters,” she said.
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