MOSCOW, January 15 (Itar-Tass) — Speaker of Russia’s State Duma Sergei Naryshkin opened on Tuesday the spring session of the parliament’s lower house.
The speaker said that deputies entered the second, very responsible year of their work. In his speech he stressed the house should bring to order “the bills due over the five previous convocations.”
“By having changed the regulations of the State Duma, we have already started this work, and over the autumn session we discussed about 200 bills of the kind,” he said adding “the speed of the work is not sufficient as yet.”
“I have ordered heads of the committees to analyse their abilities, abilities of their committees, and to present realistic suggestions,” he said. “Having inspected the heritage we have, we shall be able to allocate more time for design and discussions of truly important and effort-consuming bills, for example, complex addendums to the Civil Code.”
Besides, he said, in the Criminal Code “does not seem to remain an article, which has not been changed.”
“No doubt, every change has been acceptable and reasonable, but endless addendums quite often affect codification of an act, interfere with its logic and balance between public damage and responsibility for a crime.” He also quoted views of experts who say that the State Duma faced “big work on drafting new editions of basic codes.”
“Thus the State Duma should become the platform for expert and public discussions on important issues of the kind,” he said.
In conclusion, Naryshkin told his colleagues about the necessity to “work on the bills as true parliamentary professionals should be doing, and not to forget that the cost of a mistake may be very high.”
“Any inaccuracy in wording may affect millions of people,” he said.
“I would like to stress once again: only joint and creative, very professional work of all the factions may let us achieve the results our people are expecting from us,” Naryshkin said.