Islamabad: Pakistan has established a national digital standard for legislation after the Ministry of Law and Justice endorsed the Pakistan Digital Legislation Profile (PDLP), developed by the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA).
The PDLP adapts the international Akoma Ntoso standard to Pakistan’s legal system. It provides a common digital structure for laws, enabling individual provisions, amendments, references and links between legal instruments to be identified, searched and connected electronically.
The profile has been developed through the ingestion and structuring of around 980 primary laws of Pakistan. The Ministry of Law and Justice endorsed it after detailed consultation.
The PDA and the Ministry of Law and Justice plan to progressively ingest all of Pakistan’s laws and legal instruments into the PDLP platform, creating a consolidated digital record of both historical and current legislation.
“The Pakistan Digital Legislation Profile is a foundational reform for how citizens and businesses interact with the law,” said Dr Sohail Munir, Chairperson, Pakistan Digital Authority.
“By creating a common digital structure for legislation, it will help make legal information easier to access, regulatory requirements easier to understand, and government processes more transparent and predictable,” he added.
For citizens, the reform is expected to improve access to legal information and search facilities. Laws are currently published across different websites, documents and repositories. Structuring legislation through a common standard can allow future digital services to connect laws with their amendments, related rules and relevant authorities.
For the government, the PDLP creates a common digital structure for laws, rules and regulatory instruments across institutions. This will make it easier to trace obligations, identify duplication and outdated provisions, and support more transparent, evidence-based regulatory reform.
For businesses, the initiative offers the prospect of a clearer and more predictable regulatory environment. As the government simplifies overlapping or outdated requirements, businesses may face fewer unnecessary compliance steps, lower administrative costs and greater clarity on the rules that apply to them, reducing regulatory friction and making it easier to start, operate and expand a business in Pakistan.
The capability can directly support reforms in areas including business registration, licensing, taxation, corporate compliance, competition, energy regulation and other sectors where citizens and businesses interact with regulatory authorities.
Following endorsement of the profile, the PDA and the Ministry of Law and Justice have started engaging regulatory institutions on practical applications of machine-readable legislation. The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP), National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) and Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) have also participated in regulators’ consultation to examine how the approach can be applied across different regulatory environments.
The initiative is part of the PDA’s work under the National Digital Master Plan and will now move forward through regulatory use cases, further validation and phased adoption across the government.
The endorsement establishes an important foundation for a legal and regulatory system that will serve as the backbone of digital reform in Pakistan.
