Law reform office receives support from agency

THE Constitutional and Law Reform Commission (CLRC) received support yesterday for its work, courtesy of a non-governmental organisation, Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative (BD4HI).
CLRC Secretary Dr Eric Kwa said they had a partnership with the Bloomberg in the review of laws relating to civil registration and vital statistics which was mainly looking at data on births and deaths and marriages.
He said the support was timely as CLRC had now begun reviewing the Civil Registration Act focusing on making it a single piece of legislation.
“In PNG we have a little over 4000 laws. This office is quite small and we cannot review all the laws in two to three years,” Kwa said.
“We have targeted the colonial laws first and will review to make them up-to-date and we will also focus on new laws that will improve the lives of our people.
“When Bloomberg approached us to work together to improve laws relating to data collection stage and dissemination, we were already working on the Civil Registration Act, so we decided to focus on that.”
BD4HI is a global group based in Melbourne with headquarters in New York, United States.
It had been supporting data collection and reporting of health statistics in a number of middle-income countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Bloomberg country coordinator Dr Ninkama Moiya said they were working in partnership with Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and had sponsored the revitalisation and the functions of data and statistics in this country.
“One of the things that we are working on is looking at all the laws that have an impact on CRVS functions and systems,” Moiya said.
“It it is a four-year project and it ends in 2019.
“We are happy to be here to present the computers to Constitutional and Law Reform Commission to help them in their work on reviewing the laws.”