The EU funded Project Legal Capacity Building and Advice for the Legislative Branch of Government in Somaliland aims at supporting the bicameral Legislature of Somaliland in improving its legislative drafting process. Promoting ideas of constitutionalism, rule of law, and good governance, the project supports the Somaliland Parliament in ensuring that draft legislation complies with the constitutional and legal framework for the national law-making process as well as with international legislative drafting standards.

For that purpose, the project employs two locally recruited Legal Advisors in Hargeisa, the seat of the Somaliland Parliament, who, assisted by the Foundation’s Research Fellows, support selected committees of both Houses with the review of draft legislation by providing comparative legal research and legislative drafting advice. Furthermore, and applying the Foundation’s well-developed training-of-trainers approach, the project team is organizing a regular training program for members of the Somaliland Parliament on comparative constitutional law questions of relevance to selected law-making processes.

More generally, the project aims also at improving the preconditions for legislative drafting in Somaliland. For that purpose, the project team supports local project partners in Somaliland with the development of a glossary of legal terms, so that legal terminologies are understood and applied correctly and coherently by all stakeholders of the Somaliland law-making process when preparing, reviewing, and adopting new laws. Then the project offers support to the development of common standards and procedures for legislative drafting in Somaliland as such by facilitating discussions among relevant stakeholders and providing drafting, editing, and financial support for the publication and dissemination of an agreed upon and generally applicable legislative drafting manual. Furthermore, the project aims at improving the documentation and dissemination of all existing laws in Somaliland by collecting and compiling all applicable laws for publication and dissemination among relevant stakeholder offices of the executive, legislative and judicial branch of the Somaliland government. To further enhance access to basic knowledge and information on actual legislative drafting processes, the project team supports also the Parliament’s library as well as the research departments of the two Houses of the Somaliland Parliament by purchasing and equipping them with relevant books and information materials on legal matters and training relevant staff on basic legal research techniques and practices.

European Union

25 August 2022 – 24 August 2025

Jan Amilcar Schmidt

Email:  
Phone: +49 (0)6221 91404 61
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