Legal Information Portal to Be Operational by April
By: , March 7, 2025The Full Story
The Jamaica Legal Information Portal (JLIP) will be operational by April 2025, says Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Hon. Marlene Malahoo Forte.
“Not many know of the disinvestment in the legal infrastructure for many years, resulting in a lot of the challenges that we face, and there’s currently no official website that provides information on a wide range of legal literature – we have bits and pieces in different places. The Ministry’s solution to this problem is the creation of a central repository for the laws of Jamaica,” she said.
Mrs. Malahoo Forte was addressing Thursday’s (March 6) meeting of the Standing Finance Committee of the House of Representatives, whose members are reviewing the 2025/26 Estimates of Expenditure.
The portal is intended to improve public access to Jamaica’s laws, educate the public about all aspects of legal information and provide a facility for the public to express views on, and query the status of any law.
It will provide advanced search functionality and expanded availability of laws in various forms, with particular focus on facilitating access to the Jamaica Gazette publications, as well as content providing notification of various seminal judicial and legislative developments.
“We have received numerous concerns about the availability of the gazettes, so when this project is complete, access to the gazette will be made a lot easier. Work on the portal commenced on February 19, 2024 and is expected, all things being equal, to be completed by April of this year. In fact, I can report that the project is now in its final stages of the user acceptance testing process,” Mrs. Malahoo Forte advised.
Funding is being provided by the World Bank under its Foundations for Competitiveness and Growth Project (FCGP).
A contract valued at just over $31 million was awarded to European firm Softengi, to develop the JLIP.