Need to learn to ask for rights

[NewsWhore]

Lawyer Marisol Vicens Bello writes in El Caribe this week on how Dominicans have yet to learn how to demand our rights. She comments that the double phenomenon of the failure to fulfill the law and citizens' reduced capacity to demand the laws, has encouraged the proliferation of laws that are voted in, but not with the intention of their ever being complied with, but for the political effect they may have, to fulfill international requirements, or to give the nation an air of modernity. "That is why we need to train citizens to be the guardians of the fulfillment of the law and to know how to demand their rights, with the same zeal that they meet their duties," she writes. She adds: "We need to lose our fear of authority, that it may not be confused with respect, and understand that to transform the culture of failing to implement laws, we need citizens and organized groups that can demand the end to the violation of the law, by the due resources." She suggests training children in schools in awareness of their rights and obligations.
Vicens mentions that the fulfillment of the law is now at the discretion of those in power, and that this needs to be changed.
As an example, she points out that recently the Superintendence of Power (SIE) issued a resolution setting the maximum demand required for a user to achieve non-regulated user status at 1.4MW. She says this is in violation of Art. 108 of the Electricity Law that clearly establishes that this should be 0.2 MW as of 2005.

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