Executive Director of the Judicial System Monitoring Program Luis de Oliveira Sampaio calls on the government to translate all laws into Tetun, as many people in the community do not understand the content of existing laws.
JSMP Executive Director Luis de Oliveira Sampaio said many laws were written in Portuguese and it was clear that communities in rural areas didn’t understand Portuguese, so this was difficult for them.
“This has been our concern for many years, when we monitor in the courts there are lot of challenges so we’ve made a lot of reports and we often meet with the parliament and government but we still don’t see any change,” said Director Sampaio in Colmera, Dili.
He said Tetun was also an official language of Timor-Leste, so when making laws they should also translate into Tetun so the community could understand the content of the law.
“When we go to the community they are also concerned about this, so we ask the government to look into the issue seriously,” said the JSMP Director.
In response to this, Minister of Justice Dionisio Babo said it was not easy to translate all the laws into Tetun so they needed to go slowly.
“Currently the government has a policy of translating into Tetun before raising awareness,” said the Minister of Justice.
He acknowledged that existing laws were written in Portuguese so it was difficult for the community to understand.
“Like currently we’re making a law on drugs and we’ve made a version in Tetun so people can access it,” said Minister Babo.
On the other side, Member of Parliament Francisco da Costa said it was very important to translate laws into Tetun so they’re easy for the community to understand.
