CSTO PA representatives shared their model lawmaking experience with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia

.On January 19, 2021, Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia held remote parliamentary hearings Model Lawmaking in the Union State.
As you may recall, harmonization of the Union State Member States’ legislation is among the priorities of the Parliamentary Assembly. One of the forms of such work will be development of the Union State model legislation. This task was set by Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia, Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, during the 59th session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia.
“We have come to the conclusion that on some issues it is necessary to move from the light approximation of legislation to the formation of a single legal framework within the Union State. The first step in this direction should be the adoption of model legislative acts by the Parliamentary Assembly,” said Artem Turov, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly Commission on Legislation and Rules of Procedure, who chaired the parliamentary hearings.
During the hearings, Vyacheslav Kocharyan, adviser at the expert analysis department of the CSTO PA Secretariat, detailed the development methodology of model legislative acts and the documents regulating such development within the framework of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly. He also presented to the participants of the videoconference the model legislative acts already developed and being developed by the Assembly and reminded that “today, in accordance with the CSTO Collective Security Strategy, CSTO PA’s work is focused on counteraction to modern challenges and threats, such as:
international terrorism and extremism;
organized crime;
drug trafficking;
illegal arms trade and other transnational criminal activities.
As part of a comprehensive approach, model documents have been developed on the legal regulation of
– information security;
– critical facilities;
– crisis and emergency response frameworks.”
“In total, taking into account the autumn session of the CSTO PA, 69 model laws, recommendations, agreements and other model documents were prepared and sent to the national parliaments,” he recalled.
Vyacheslav Kocharyan highlighted recent emergence of fundamentally new aspects of the development of social relations due to, for example, digitalization, robotization and the use of artificial intelligence, as well as the expansion of the range of common challenges and threats. In this regard, the Union State members’ decision to develop legal regulation models for both states and their implementation into the national legislation can be extremely effective not only for them, but also for the CIS and CSTO, Mr Kocharyan believes.
However, “the spheres of application of the model lawmaking method should be defined jointly and independently by the parliamentarians of the Union State themselves,” Mr Kocharyan noted.
According to the press service of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia, the parliamentary hearings addressed the priority spheres of model regulation and the topics of model legislation to be worked out in 2021–2022.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia is an observer to the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly.
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