Every fourth proposal of Kazakh citizens on bills is ignored

The Kazakh authorities only formally consider the proposals and comments of citizens on normative legal acts (NLAs) laid out by state bodies for discussion. This conclusion was reached by the experts of the Public Fund “Transparency Kazakhstan”, who analyzed the activity of Kazakh citizens in the discussion of draft laws.

According to the published results of the study, by the way, dedicated to the international day against corruption, in 2018 the state bodies of Kazakhstan worked out 44 880 normative acts, of which 22 048 were adopted for the first time, 13 594 were amended and supplemented, 9238 were lost.

“The lawmaking procedure obliges the state bodies of Kazakhstan to publish each drafted normative act on the portal “Open dialog”, where anyone with an electronic digital signature can leave a comment, question or suggestion. To find out how active citizens are in discussing bills and how government agencies relate to this, social activists studied about 5000 draft legal acts in 13 areas of public relations adopted in 2018,” the report says.

The Fund explains that most of the bills were related to the budget, taxes, agriculture, transport, elections and health. However, in these areas, the activity of participants in public discussions was below average. Accordingly, a higher level of citizens’ interest in the legal acts was observed in the areas of ecology and licensing, where every second bill was commented.

“95% of comments were received on draft by-laws: orders of ministries, decisions and resolutions of city halls and local elected bodies. Citizens and companies of Kazakhstan did not actually participate in the discussion of laws, codes or decrees. On the part of state bodies (developers of draft laws), there were recorded different dynamics of readiness to conduct a dialogue and accept comments and suggestions of citizens and companies. In all spheres of public relations, the developers of draft laws from Aktobe, Atyrau, Zhambyl and Mangistau regions most often ignored the comments of participants in public discussions. In general, the willingness to discuss proposals is above average,” the Fund says.

The authors of the report analyzed and compared 3375 comments of citizens to 1673 legal acts and 2504 responses of state bodies to these comments in order to determine whether the proposals of the public in the country were included in the final versions of the adopted normative acts.

As a result of this comparison, it turned out that the number of incompetent answers from government bodies was 3-6 times more than the amount of incorrect requests and comments from citizens.

In support of this observation, the authors of the report cite the following examples: the local elected body of the East Kazakhstan region, at the request of a citizen to attach a document to the bill, said that he could not do this, since it was at the development stage. And in the Ministry of Finance, at the request to enclose the draft republican budget, they provided a detailed description of the text structure, but the project itself was not attached.

“The most common violations, for which comments of participants in public discussions were received, were: publication of a draft legal act without the attachment of documents; violation of the terms of public discussion, reduction of the terms of public discussion of draft regulatory documents of a sub-legislative level, which are not subject to the norms of the Rules for the public discussion of draft regulatory documents in terms of determining the draft as urgent; errors in the design of the requisite part of the documents, the terms of the adoption of the legal acts, grammatical and stylistic errors; lack of understanding the calculation of introduced tariffs, taxes, obligations, tax increase contrary to the norms established by the Tax Code, lack of understanding differences between types of taxes and etc.,” the authors of the report note.

However, the level of interaction between the state and citizens is growing. So, from the approved 184 proposals of citizens and companies to 1072 draft legal acts, the final versions of the adopted 756 normative acts included 1212 citizens’ ideas. That is, it turns out that the state, when adopting the NLA, takes into account approximately every third proposal of citizens.

However, this is not a cause for joy, since, according to experts of the PF “Transparency Kazakhstan”, in 2018, there were 2 times less bills submitted for public discussion than adopted NLAs.

“In 2009, 15 936 draft legal acts were submitted for public discussion, even if we take into account all the bills submitted earlier for public discussion in 2017 (13 127 draft legal acts were submitted in 2017), their number is less than those adopted in 2018 – 44 880 NLAs,” the authors of the report explain.

Considering all of the above, the Fund’s experts came to several conclusions. Firstly, the participation of citizens of Kazakhstan in the legislative activity can be characterized as passive. Secondly, the Kazakh authorities very formally consider the proposals and comments of citizens on draft laws. Thirdly, the lawmaking of the authorities is discussed at the level of technical errors, conceptual objections are often not accepted. Fourthly, only one of the three approved comments is reflected in the final versions of the NLA.

Fifthly, the plan of legislative work of the government is often not implemented. And finally, the most important thing is that only 1 person takes part in the public discussion of 99% of draft legal acts!

Based on these findings, the Fund’s experts recommend that citizens actively participate in the discussion of draft legal acts, and government bodies should actively raise awareness among the population about the possibilities to participate in the discussion of draft legal acts and influence the legislative process. In addition, the Fund strongly advises organizing an anti-corruption examination and increasing the transparency of the legislative process through the introduction of the concept of “lobbyism” and the subsequent lobbying law, which is a recommendation of the Anti-Corruption Network OECD, and evaluated by international organizations Transparency International and GRECO.