A PNG legal dictionary

By MALUM NALU
PAPUA New Guinea’s first legal dictionary, also the first in the South Pacific region, was launched on Wednesday night.
Kwa’s Legal Dictionary is authored by Dr Eric Kwa, the country’s leading legal expert and Constitutional and Law Reform Commission Secretary, who will soon take over as Justice and Attorney-General Secretary.
Kwa was formerly associate professor at the University of PNG Law School where he taught for 18 years in environmental law, constitutional law, natural resources law and international law.
He is the author of the legal text Constitutional Law of Papua New Guinea (2001) and five other legal texts.
He has published widely in the areas of constitutional law, environmental law and natural resources law.
His last book was Public Participation in Law Making in the South Pacific: The Review of the Papua New Guinea Organic Law on Provincial Governments and Local Level Governments.
“The idea to publish this dictionary came about in 2007 just after I completed by PhD,” Kwa tells me,
“I looked at my literature and asked myself, ‘why don’t we publish Papua New Guinea’s own legal dictionary’?
“Since 2009 I’ve been working on this book, which was supposed to have been finished earlier but it has taken me 10 years.
“Part of the reason is that as soon as I finished collating the document, I got appointed as the Secretary for CLRC, and being head of a department is very hard to sit and write.
“What I’ve been doing is that in the evenings I’ve been going and sitting down.
“At weekends, some of the trips that I take, I take time to look at the words at the phrases.
“We try to make it uniquely Papua New Guinean – not following the normal dictionary that people are used to.
“What I have done is that I’ve extracted words and phrases from the Supreme Court and National Court cases of Papua New Guinea, going as far back as 1951.
“What I’ve done is that I’ve collected those words and those phrases, which are used on a regular basis in our judicial system.
“The idea is that we need to use our own terms and our own words, how we define them, because it gives us character as a nation.
“It means that we understand the words in our context.
“We don’t need to use a British legal dictionary or Australian legal dictionary, which is conceptualised in their own environment and in their own setting.
“By putting together a legal dictionary for PNG, and even for the South Pacific, we are now able to define our people’s values and aspirations, explained by the courts.
“The cases are coming before the courts, the courts look at the words and the phrases, and then they define them according to the cases that are presented before them.
“My hope is that by producing this legal dictionary, we can now help our young lawyers, our lawyers, our academics, our judges.
“It’s been done in simple English so we can go as far as grades 11 and 12 for legal studies, so they can also use this book as a reference point.”
What Kwa has done is that he has identified a word, for example, ‘absolute majority vote’ – a word you can’t find in a normal dictionary.
“In the Papua New Guinea context, it’s already been defined,” he explains.
“What I have done is that I have found the definition.
“First of all, I find the statute, or Act of Parliament.
“Does an Act of Parliament define ‘absolute majority vote’.
“If it doesn’t define it, then I look at the court cases.
“When I look at the court cases, I come across this case, Hagai Joshua v Aaron Maya from Morobe.
“This case discussed ‘absolute majority vote’ and then they defined the term.
“What I’ve done is that I’ve extracted the term from this Hagai Joshua case and presented it.
“I also looked to see if there is a Statute, an Act of Parliament, a provision of the Constitution that also supports this definition.
“I’ve come across Schedule 1.2 of the Constitution that says we define absolute majority vote in this way.
“Instead of going and looking at Osbourne’s Legal Dictionary, Maxwell’s Legal Dictionary or Concise Legal Dictionary, I have basically gone to our own law, our own cases and extracted the meaning of the words and phrases.”
Kwa’s hope is that in the long term, this will guide the development of what the ‘Underlying Law of Papua New Guinea’ and a ‘Melanesian jurisprudence’.
“By using our own words, our own phrases, it will then shape the development of our law in PNG,” he adds.
“For me, this is our small contribution to the nation.
“By producing this material, it will then become a tool for our legal practitioners and even our people, the ordinary person to read it.
“I’ve done it in such a way that it is simple English language so that people can be able to read it and understand.”
Kwa’s done the hard yards over the last decade.
“It’s taken me 10 years,” he says.
“It’s not an easy task because it’s a legal dictionary.
“Not many people are able to write a legal dictionary.
“It doesn’t pop up overnight.
“It takes time and effort.
“It requires a lot of thinking.
“I spent about three hours on a word, because I look at a word and I read the cases.
“How many cases in Papua New Guinea talk about that word?
“Which case was the first to define that word?
“Which case was the first to define that phrase?
“There are recent cases that refer to the original case, so I have to refer to all of them.”
Kwa’s book is just in time for the Apec leaders’ summit.
“We want to show to the world that we can also do this kind of work,” he says.
“We want to show that we can also write legal dictionaries, that we can publish legal papers, that we can publish books.
“It is my hope that this particular publication will be my small contribution to the bigger Apec agenda.
“As we move into the digitised world, we should begin to look at inclusiveness.
“From the legal community, this is my contribution to Apec.”