Attorney General presents laws in digital form
In a move that has put Belize at the forefront of the region’s legal systems, all nine volumes of Belize’s substantive laws are now available on CD ROM. At this morning’s media launch, Attorney General Godfrey Smith told reporters that the new electronic copy contains all the laws of Belize updated through December thirty-first, 2000.
Godfrey Smith, Attorney General
“Normally laws aren’t updated every year. The practice in Belize has been laws are updated after every ten years or so because you have the existing laws and each government keeps passing more and more laws. The United Democratic Party in its last term passed some two hundred and twenty-five pieces; this current government is at roughly two hundred different pieces of legislation, so law making doesn’t stand still, new and more laws come into force. This new set of laws is an attempt to compile everything in one place so that up to December thirty-first, 2000, the nine volumes represent the comprehensive laws of Belize.”
Ann-Marie Williams
“Given the new laws past every so often and some amendments, how current will it be and how long will the electronic copy last?”
Godfrey Smith
“Our aim is to have at the end of each year a new CD with the update as opposed to every ten years and certainly that’s true for the online version as well which should be up-to-date earlier than the end of the year. But I think so that it’s done properly and consistently, we can look for updates electronically every year, so in effect the version you have of a CD will always be somewhere like six months to one year behind.”
Hard copies are on sale at the Attorney General’s Ministry in Belmopan for the princely sum of three thousand dollars, while the CD ROM version costs only seven hundred and fifty. Free online access from any part of the world is available by login on to www.belizelaw.org. And if you’re interested in trials, major Supreme Court judgements can also be obtained at the click of a mouse from that website.
