The Milli Majlis Committee for Law Policy and State-Building held a scheduled meeting on 13 November.

The Committee Chairman Ali Huseynli opened the meeting and announced the two items on the agenda.

First, the Committee Member Kamal Jafarov tabled the second reading of the draft amendments to the Bill ‘On the Civil Service’. The MP said that the main goal of the Bill was to ensure proper and correct performance assessment of civil servants as well as the identification, promotion and rational application of their potentials. The principal aim of the document consists in improving the civil servant performance assessment rules. According to Mr Jafarov, the appropriate executive authority would conduct the performance assessments at the end of each calendar year in order to stimulate higher professional competence in civil servants, identify their further education needs and assess them for adequacy for their current positions. The final marks would reflect the performance of the assigned tasks by 50 per cent whilst 40 per cent would be determined by the applicable criteria and another 10 per cent would stem from work discipline evaluations.

The civil servant assessment results would be put in scorecards and civil servants would be interviewed upon the final marking to discuss their service performance marks and the commentaries accompanying them. Civil servants could then be rewarded, promoted to next qualification rank prematurely, engaged in further education and specialist training for the perfection of their performance or skills, transferred to analogous positions matching their knowledge and abilities or demoted rank-wise depending on the ultimate performance assessment marks. A civil servant dissenting from their performance mark would have the right to contest it either administratively or in a court of law.  

Kamal Jafarov also made clear the questions, special opinions and proposals that MPs had submitted to the Committee in written during the first reading of the document at a plenary session of the Milli Majlis. The MPs Gudrat Hasanguliyev, Erkin Gadirli, Amina Agazade and Etibar Aliyev as well as Vugar Asgarov of the State Examinations Centre exchanged views on the document and spoke of its importance.

Then, the draft amendments to the Code of Administrative Offences were discussed in the first reading at the committee meeting. The Committee Chairman Ali Huseynli cited the unifying nature of the document, which, he added, had been drawn up in line with the amendments to the Environmental Protection Bill. The document at hand envisages the administrative liability of business enterprises importing, producing and selling to consumers polythene bags with film thickness of up to 15 microns as well as disposable plastic swizzle sticks, forks, knives, plates and cups, and for repeated administrative offences committed by persons already subjected to administrative penalties for their first offences of the nature. It is proposed in the Bill that it should come into force with regards to polythene bags as of 1 January 2021 and to other disposable goods as of 1 July 2021.

The Committee Members decided to submit both Bills for deliberations at a plenary session of the Milli Majlis. 

The Press and Public Relations Department
The Milli Majlis