Extraordinary parliament session

Well, Parliament is due to convene next Wednesday for a month long extraordinary session. According to article 82 the constitution, the only issues that can be discussed during an extraordinary session are those which are specified by the royal decree ordering the convening of the session.

And there is a lot to do. The royal decree has about 20 proposed pieces of legislation to be considered. These include modifications to the penal code (canceling the death penalty on some crimes), modification of the press and publications law, the political parties’ law, the income tax law as well as the anti-terrorism law. Many of the provisions of the new legislations promise to be controversial, and it will be interesting to watch the debate on them to play out.

In my opinion, the most interesting will be the debate on the anti-terrorism law. The draft was published today. It defines a terror act as “Any predetermined act committed by any method which may lead to the death of any person or causing bodily harm or causes damage to public or private property or in the transportation system or the infrastructure or the facilities of international organizations or diplomatic missions if the purpose is to disrupt public order or to endanger society and it’s security or to disrupt the application of the constitution or laws or to influence the policy of the state or the government or to force it to implement or abstain from implementation of certain actions or to endanger national security by way of fear, terror or violence”. Earlier leaked proposals for the law drew criticism that they didn’t contain a definition for terror. It is clear that this definition was written to address this concern. The scope of the law is to provide a legal framework for security agencies by which they can preempt any terror activities.

The proposed law allows, among other things, for the public attorney to impose monitoring of suspected individuals, prevention of their travel, searching of their premises and the freezing of their funds for anywhere between three and six months. The decision of public attorney will be subject to review by the state security court and the appellate court. The law does not allow indefinite jailing, as some people have suggested. The law allows jailing of suspects for two weeks which can be extended for another two weeks in "justifiable" cases.

The number of laws being considered is quite large given the time frame available. I would hope that enough time will be available for a reasonable review for all of them. I will try to keep you posted on the most interesting developments.