Simplified legislative procedure and its implications for democracy

At least seven bills have been submitted by the government to the Assembly of the Republic using requests for a simplified (or urgent) procedure since President Daniel Chapo took power in January 2025.

The urgency in approving or amending legal instruments may reflect the need to operationalize, without delay, the president’s vision for his five-year term, forcing him to transform his ideas, as articulated in his manifesto, into instruments with the force of law.

It is an action that allows critical issues for the country’s agenda to be dealt with at the speed they deserve, demonstrating, above all, a firm commitment to the Democratic Rule of Law on which our system is based. However, urgency can often compromise perfection, leading to what are noble ideas not translating into the noble goals they are intended to.

A consensus is beginning to emerge in domestic (and beyond) public opinion circles about the country’s trajectory in the last ten years, making it urgent the need to set in motion a recovery process that will prevent the country from becoming hostage to its own past.

But it is important to ensure that in seeking to correct past mistakes new ones are not made that will also have to be subject to urgent correction in the future. Having been invested with the powers to do so, the Head of State is sovereign in the governance options he wishes to imprint; at the end of the day, there are expectations from electors for him to deliver. However, it is important to note that the processes through which such objectives are achieved do matter, and it is unquestionable that the best laws are those whose approval has been preceded by a broad socialization and debate among the most diverse segments of society.

This becomes even more pertinent when it comes to structuring legal provisions for different spheres of public life. It would be fair to consider that the legislation on decentralisation has been widely debated by the public over the seven years of its validity, and that the report of the Commission for Reflection on the Decentralisation Model (CREMOD) has sufficiently captured the essence of this debate. There would therefore be no need for further consultations.

But this is not the case, for example, in relation to the recently approved legislation on local content, oil and mining, the development bank and other previous laws, such as the tax legislation package, approved in December last year, using the same simplified procedure.

It is not only the public that is deprived of socialization and contact with the content of legislative proposals that result from the use of the simplified procedure; legislators themselves, aware that they are acting in the supreme interest of the State, are obliged to pass extremely important laws, often without full understanding of the scope of the underlying matters or even their long-term impact on the sectors concerned.      

It is worth noting that in the case of issues that were part of the electoral manifesto of the President as a candidate, there will have been enough time to debate them before codifying them in draft laws, so their character now as urgent documents does not really make any sense.

Urgent requests mean that there is a very little time (typically about ten days) between the submission of the Bills and their final approval by the Assembly of the Republic. In these circumstances, it is practically impossible for Members to have sufficient time to take ownership of the content of the documents sent to them and to engage in deep and meaningful debates before they are adopted.

It means, in practical terms, that parliament is being reduced to an institution whose function is simply to approve orders from the executive, thus ceasing to carry out the constitutional responsibilities that fall to it as a sovereign body with the function of legislating well and supervising government action.

The subordination of a body that has the character of representing the people undermines the principle of separation and interdependence of powers and ultimately endangers democracy itself.