About this committee

Legislative drafting is a specialist skill required by governments to achieve clear and consistent laws. While each Pacific Island country has its own ways of developing its laws, it is the role of legislative drafters to take drafting instructions and ‘translate’ them into legally effective draft bills.

The PILON Legislative Drafters’ Committee (PLDC) is a network of legislative drafters in the Pacific region. As a committee under PILON, it brings together key resources to build the capacity and expertise of the region’s legislative drafters. The PLDC provides a valuable opportunity for Pacific legislative drafters to meet and strengthen professional linkages and share information and knowledge on legislative drafting.

Goals

The PLDC’s objectives are to:

advance the skills and capacity of legislative drafters in PILON member countries, and
advance regional cooperation and networking amongst legislative drafters.

Chair

Fiji Islands (Chair of the PLDC and Chair of the PLDC Steering Committee)

Samoa (Inaugural Chair 2020-2023)

Members

Law and justice officials from PILON member countries with an interest in legislative drafting are welcome to contact the PILON Secretariat to join the PLDC. There is no cost to join.

The PLDC Steering Committee includes representatives from the following seven countries who support the PLDC’s strategic direction and activities:

Australia
Fiji
Nauru
New Zealand
Papua New Guinea
Samoa
Tonga
Vanuatu

Background

Pacific legislative drafters have been networking since 2007. The PLDC’s predecessor, the Pacific Legislative Drafters’ Technical Forum (the Forum), was initially hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat, then received coordination support from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat from 2012 to 2019. In 2019, PILON agreed to support the Forum by adopting it as a PILON committee. The PLDC then formed and appointed a Chair and smaller Steering Committee.

PLDC Member’s Zone

The PILON Secretariat saves the PLDC’s governance documents and Work Plan action item resources on the PLDC page of the Members’ Zone on the PILON website.

First time users will need to register to access this information via the PILON website: https://pilonsec.org/login/.