Africa-Press – Uganda. Parliament has passed a number of amendments to laws that have either been nullified by courts of law or have remained redundant for a certain period of time after they were enacted by Parliament.
The Law Revision (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill, 2022, seeks to provide for the repeal of specified Acts to provide for the conversion of fines and other financial amounts in specified laws to currency points; provide for the conversion of financial amounts expressed in Pounds in specified laws to currency points; and provide for the amendment of several laws to correct the anomalies in those laws.
It also seeks to effect the decisions of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court to transfer provisions in Finance Acts to the relevant laws and to incorporate provisions on winding up in the Collective Investment Schemes Act, the Partnership Act and the Cooperative Societies Act for related matters.
Mr Kiryowa Kiwanuka, the Attorney General, yesterday told Parliament that he would ensure all laws that have been redundant and affected by court decisions get repealed for better administration of justice.
“The purpose of this legislation is to clean not to amend. If the Constitutional Court asks me to review a particular law, I only clean, but not amend,” he said.
The Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee yesterday presented its report on the Bill to the House, with many of the committee recommendations passed.
Under Clause 1, the Bill seeks to repeal a number of enactments for various revisions, including redundancy, being spent, being affected or superseded by government policy change as well as those affected by amendments to other laws.
The committee, however, indicated that it is of the considered view that some of the laws still serve practical and legal value to Ugandans and repealing them will deny Ugandans services obtainable through those enactments.
“The Committee recommended that a number of enactments are removed from schedule 1 of the Bill since they are still relevant. Further, as a consequential amendment, the committee recommended that certain Acts be amended to incorporate various provisions scattered in other legislation,” part of the recommendations state.
While the Bill in Clause 2 proposed to amend the laws specified in Schedule 2 of the Bill by substituting the fines and other financial amounts in those Acts into currency points using the formula in the Law Revision (Fines and other Financial Amounts in Criminal Matters) Act, 2008, the committee observed that in converting the fines in some Acts listed in the second schedule, there was non-compliance with the modification formula prescribed in the Law Revision (Fines and Other Financial Amounts in Criminal Matters) Act.
In that regard, the Committee recommended that the fines under some provisions be revised in accordance with the Law Revision (Fines and Other Financial Amounts in Criminal Matters) Act.
The House also reduced the mandatory bail days from 480 for capital offenses to 180, while those for other offences was reduced from 240 to 60 days or two months.
Of interest to the media is Clause 14 of the Bill, which proposed to amend sections of the Penal Code Act that are intended to remove the reference to seditious publication and to reinstate the offence of publishing false news.
The Legal committee, however, recommended that the deletion of some sections of the Penal Code Act be in order to comply and to give full effect to the decision of the Constitutional Court.
Succession Act amendment
The Committee said the Bill under Clause 16 made a number of proposals to amend the Succession Act by repealing, substituting and amended in some sections, which it observed were provisions that were either introduced or amended under the Succession (Amendment) Act of 2022. The Committee proposed that the Bill be passed subject to the proposed amendments.
Proposed amendments
The Bill under Clause 3 and 4 proposed to modify fines and other financial amounts in the Penal Code Act Cap 120.
The committee recommended that Clause 5 and Schedule 5 of the Bill be deleted because they proposed to modify the provisions of the laws by substituting the financial amounts expressed in currency points specified in those provisions with the financial amounts expressed in Uganda shillings, as it contravened Section 5 of the Law Revision (Fines and Other Financial Amounts in Criminal Matters) Act.
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