The Sciences and Education Committee of the Milli Majlis began its first meeting in the autumn parliamentary session, held on 15 September, with a minute of silence in memoriam the military servicemen killed whilst fending off the recent border provocation by Armenia. The committee chairman Bakhtiyar Aliyev shared his thoughts on those developments and said that the courageous Azerbaijani Army led by the victorious Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev had given the aggressor the kind of response he deserved.

Then, the committee chairman said that today was also the date of Baku’s liberation from the Armenian-Bolshevik captivity and, at the same time, the inviolable Azerbaijani-Turkish fraternity was celebrated on this day. Further still, another schooling year had begun today – including for the first time since liberation at the secondary school of the village of Agali in the Zanghilan Province of the country, Mr Aliyev continued.

After that, the assembly went on to consider the three items on its agenda. Mr Aliyev informed the meeting participants of the committee work plan for the 2022 autumn session. He mentioned the slated preparation of a Tertiary Education Bill, deliberations upon and expert assessments of the documents and appeals received by the Committee and, besides, consideration together with other parliamentary committees of the papers queuing to appear before the Milli Majlis.

Mr Aliyev proceeded to table a report about the work that the Committee had done during the 2022 spring and extraordinary sessions, marking the 5 committee meetings that had been held to look at 11 matters withal. They had discussed draft amendments to the Vocational Education Law, General Education Law and the Law of (Special) Education for Persons with Disabilities. Besides, the Committee had processed other documents. All those Bills had been submitted to the parliamentary plena; the Milli Majlis had passed them in the end.

During the same past two plena, the committee chairman and members had attended culture-specific events in the country and abroad. Those had been a session of the CIS IPA Permanent Commission on Science and Education, the 7^th International Congress of the Social Sciences at the ADA University that the Milli Majlis, the Grand National Assembly of Turkiye and the International Balkans University had co-organised, and the presentation of the book Our Tangible Cultural Heritage in the Historical Azerbaijani Lands: from Irevan to Zangazur, held by the Social Research Centre. Last but not least, the Committee’s MPs had been present at the unveiling of the findings of the study The Fate of the Tepebashi Quarter as the Last Remnant of the Azerbaijani Cultural and Historical Heritage in Irevan: the Destruction of the Heritage of the Azerbaijani People and the Deletion of the Traces of its Presence in Armenia (held by the Centre for Strategic Communications).

In addition, the MPs on the Committee had been going to the annual wakes of the Patriotic War shahids and talked to their families and, of course, there had been surgeries and citizens’ applications had been considered and forwarded to appropriate government departments for resolution.

The deputy committee chairman Musa Gasimli and the MPs Isa Habibbayli, Etibar Aliyev, Jeyhun Mammadov, Tamam Jafarova, Kamila Aliyeva, Mushfig Mammadli, Rafael Huseynov, Parvin Karimzade and Fatma Yildirim commented on the report and the autumn-session work plan as well as on a number of issues du jour.

Ultimately, the plan was approved and the report was found to be acceptable.

Next, the Committee reviewed the first reading of amendments to the E-Signature and E-Document Law, drawn up, as it was duly pointed out, in compliance with Paragraph 4.2 of the 2020-2022 National Work Plan to Promote the Open Government (approved with the presidential decree dated 27 February 2020).

The proposed amendments to Article 9 of the Law, which is concerned with the registration and accreditation of the Centre for Certification Services, indicate that the documents or information required for registration of the Centre shall not be requested from the applying person where it is possible to obtain same from the relevant state department via the Electronic State Information System. Should it prove impossible to obtain such documents or information via the ESIS, however, then, either an appropriate query shall be sent to the relevant state authority on the applying person’s consent or the applying person shall have to produce the said documents and information himself or herself.

Upon deliberation the Committee recommended that the first-reading Bill should be tabled at a plenary sitting of the Milli Majlis.

The Press and Public Relations Department

The Milli Majlis