Democratization Legislative Support than addressing them on an individual basis, law by law, the focus should be on addressing the underlying causes. Therefore, in addition to providing advice on the substantive drafting of legislation, the Office is also assisting states in the development of effective, open, and transparent legislative processes. Main Issues k Insufficient exposure to international standards: Governments and lawmakers in the OSCE region are not always fully aware of the consequences for the legal system at the national level of the treaties, conventions, and other international instruments that they have ratified. Experience has shown that international human rights norms are not always properly interpreted or are insufficiently reflected in domestic legislation. This applies in particular to narrowly defined limitation clauses in human rights treaties. k Lack of resources and technical knowledge: Legis- lators sometimes lack the resources and technical knowledge needed to draft legislation, particularly in areas where there are no domestic precedents. With limited exposure to practices and legal options from other countries, lawmakers rely on familiar concepts and models rather than adapting to new challenges, even where those models fail to address the task at hand. David Goldberger (front) and Alexander Vashkevich, members of the ODIHR’s expert panel on freedom of assembly, at a roundtable on legislation affecting freedom of assembly, Belgrade, 28 June. MILAN OBRADOVIC All OSCE states face a legislative challenge: they have to ensure that the laws they pass measure up to the purposes for which they were conceived. In addition to ensuring compliance with the relevant international standards, this also implies a process of developing legislation that can be effectively enforced to achieve its goals. This requires that laws be prepared, drafted, adopted, and published through clearly defined stages and within a predetermined time frame. Only such a properly managed process allows for thorough discussions of the draft at each of its stages, as well as the performance of certain verifications indispensable to ensuring the effectiveness of the legislation. Ultimately, the real test of a law’s effectiveness is its implementation: how it is treated by law enforcement, how it is interpreted by the courts, how it is respected or implemented by the target population. In lending support to OSCE states in the development of sound legislation, the ODIHR first focuses on helping lawmakers draft legislation that complies with the relevant international standards on a particular issue in all areas of the human dimension. During the law-drafting stage, ODIHR experts provide advice on how to ensure that international standards are properly reflected, while also sharing experiences and practices from other countries that have dealt with similar issues. Drafting a good law, however, is only half the work. Experience has shown that the most effective and efficient laws are the result of a legislative process that is composed of several stages such as policy analysis, evaluating draft legislation before it is adopted, gathering input from those who will be affected by the legislation, and monitoring how the legislation is implemented. Scrutiny of individual laws often reveals more deep-seated weaknesses in a country’s law-making system. The same weaknesses tend to reemerge time and again, suggesting that, rather Annual Report  47