A total of 14 laws must be approved by the Cuban National Assembly in 2020, according to the legislative schedule endorsed by the Cuban parliament last December and published this week in the Official Gazette.
According to the schedule approved on December 21, 2019, which follows the guidelines of the island’s new Constitution, the first laws that will be presented for consideration by the Assembly will be five: the one concerning the Foreign Service, Revocation and the organization and operation of the Council of Ministers, the Provincial Government of People’s Power, and the Municipal Administration Council.
All of them are scheduled for July 2020, when the year’s first ordinary session of parliament takes place.
Five others, including those on the People’s Courts and Criminal Procedure, are scheduled for the October session, while in December four important laws must be passed: the law of the president and vice president of the Republic, Defense and National Security, the one on the Housing, and the one on Public Health.
This set of laws will be the vanguard of the 39 planned until the closing of the current legislature of the National Assembly in 2022. Together with them, there are also 31 decree-laws, which have to be approved by the Council of State, and of which 15 correspond to the next 12 months.
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The first three decree-laws must be approved as soon as next February. They are: the work system of the cadres and their reserves, the one dedicated to the use of genetically modified organisms in Cuban agriculture, and the one on the Improvement of the National System of Documentation and Archive Management.
The approval of the rest is distributed between April, June, September and November, and among them are the Reorganization of the Science, Technology and Innovation System, the one dedicated to the industrial production of food and the long-awaited one about animal protection.
Two decree-laws related to constitutional rights must also be passed in 2020: one is the Protection of Personal Data and the other on the rights to demonstration and assembly, while another to regulate telecommunications, information technologies, communication and use of the radio spectrum is scheduled for February 2021.
According to the schedule, in the following legislature (2023-2028) another 24 norms―between laws and decree-laws―will be submitted to the Assembly for approval.
However, the Official Gazette clarifies that the current schedule “is subject to the adjustments and priorities demanded by the legislative work and the country’s development requirements, which will also be approved by the National Assembly,” which means that parliament could modify the established order.
