[kictanet] Media council Draft bill 2010 (Day Five--tenure of office of Council members )

[Solomon Mburu Kamau]

Listers,

There is a duplicate between Article 7  & Article 10 of the Bill.
Article 7,  provides for the qualification of Chair and other Members
of the Council, while Article 10, in a way, provides for the
requirements for appointment to the commission.
They, as Toby has said, should perhaps be merged.

On the question off tenure of the office of Council members, my
opinion is they should only be allowed a re-appointment for one morer
term to avoid domination and 'over-stays'.
Further, the Bill does not provide for the procedures of the election
of members apart from the chair.  Will they be appointed by the JSC,
CJ, KUJ etc? Will the election by proxy, acclamation or secret ballot?
I think in line with democratic principles, they should be elected
from among the membership sitting at the Council, like what LSK does.

To another view, the government reserved a third of positions in
public bodies to women. Therefore, does this mean out of the seven
members appointed (Article 6), three should be women? If so, just
wondering, will the other interested groups - the disabled,
marginalized, youth etc - be considered?

Nice weekend.

On 28/01/2011, toby at law-democracy.org <toby at law-democracy.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I hope you will not mind if I make a few comments on yesterday's
> discussion before moving on to the topic of today. Sorry to be late again,
> but I'm sort of in transit (actually, I spent 12 hours in plane yesterday,
> only to return to my starting point because we could not land at the
> destination!).
>
> The Bill does provide for the appointment of the Chair (section 8(6 or
> really (7)), but I agree that it would be preferable for the group to
> appoint its own Chair and this is a common practice.
>
> A few comments on the debate about independence, on the one hand, and the
> role of the judiciary, on the other. I am very sensitive to Lydia's point
> about capture of these bodies by government and of course the Rwandan
> Council is a disaster on this point. But to be honest, that was one area
> where I felt this draft Bill was pretty good. Of course its independence
> rests heavily on the independence of the judicial bodies and individuals
> involved, but otherwise, it does have reasonably robust systems, including
> the ability of anyone, or any group, to nominate and then the shortlisting
> by the appointing Committee (although I would remove the representatives
> from the Ministry of Justice and State Law Office from this Committee and
> replace them with more independent people, probably not from the media,
> since the other three members are already media representatives). So I see
> the approach as a bit of a trade-off: perhaps excessive role for the
> judiciary v. relatively strong guarantees of independence. I note that the
> role of the JSC is simply to establish the appointing Committee. I'm not
> sure which other body could be trusted with this.
>
> So, my tweaks would be to change the composition of the appointing
> Committee (which is the most important decision-maker in this process),
> allow the body to elect its own chair and remove the requirement for the
> chair to be eligible for appointment as a High Court judge.
>
> On today's questions:
>
> 1) Grace is right to point out the duplication and to some extent
> contradiction between sections 7 and 10. Probably they should be
> integrated.
>
> 2) I have already commented on the Chair. I don't see a particular problem
> with the Chair being reappointed, but there should at least be another
> election.
>
> Best, Toby
>
>
> ___________________________________
> Toby Mendel
>
> Centre for Law and Democracy
> toby at law-democracy.org
> Tel:  +1 902 431-3688
> Fax: +1 902 431-3689
> www.law-democracy.org
>
>
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*Solomon Mbũrũ Kamau*

*****************************************************
*Man is a gregarious animal and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the
same way to the side of a hill!*

AND

*It is better to die in dignity than in the ignominy of ambiguous
generosity! *

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