AG not capable of drafting bills: Nasheed

Parliament speaker Mohamed Nasheed said on Sunday that he does not believe that the Attorney General's Office has the capacity to draft bills.

Nasheed, who is contesting the MDP primary on Saturday, held a press conference this Sunday to brief on his campaign. Replying to a question on the competition between MPs when the session begins next month, Nasheed said the government and parliament were at loggerheads in 2019 over the drafting of bills.

Nasheed first spoke about the government's delay in sending bills to parliament and poor quality of bills sent when the mental health bill had to be withdrawn. He had said at the time:

Noting that he allowed a lot of lax in the controversy over drafting bills, Nasheed also spoke of the attorney general's lack of capacity to frame the bill properly. He said several amendments need to be made to the bills sent by the Attorney General's Office to parliament. He also said that the parliament committee had to keep a number of bills at the committee stage where the work was not carried out as per the re-framing of bills.

"The Attorney General doesn't really have that capacity. And many times, each of these bills has to be altered in many ways while drafting it. We have to keep the bills in various committees because of the way the bill has been drafted without taking it forward," he said.

This is due to president Ibrahim Mohamed Solih's subversion of the presidential system in order to take control of the parliament, Nasheed said.

Despite the difficulty of drafting bills, he did not have any difficulty in running the parliament, he said.