DOHA: Set up eight years ago with much fanfare as a key forum of local professionals, the Qatari Lawyers’ Association has practically become defunct with no funds and office to support its activities.
The biggest challenge the Association faces is to keep its membership base intact as a number of lawyers have withdrawn their memberships over the past few years saying they don’t find the forum effective any more.
The Association had a rented office for a full year after its launch in 2005 with the state providing financial support. The government withdrew its patronage as the year ended, forcing the Association to vacate.
The office’s monthly rent was QR15,000, besides operating expenses of over QR200,000 a year — a sum the Association has no way to mobilise in the absence of state backing. Reliable sources told The Peninsula yesterday that the Association currently has 120 members and each one of them pays an annual membership fee of QR300, which adds up to QR36,000 in a year.
“Obviously, we can’t pay the rent for the Association’s office if our annual income is barely
QR36,000, so the office was disbanded,” a source said. Association members are not able to meet in the absence of an office.
“The only time the Association members gather is when its chairman, a figurative head, invites us for an ‘iftar’ (fast-breaking) feast merely out of courtesy during Ramadan,” said the source.
He added that he withdrew his membership a long time ago.
Prominent lawyer Mohsin Thoyab Al Suwaidi told this newspaper that the last time he attended a meeting of the Association was several years ago to reelect the chairman.
“I vividly recall that at that meeting several members refused to be on the board of the Association,” Al Suwaidi said, confirming that the forum was in a bad shape financially. “It’s practically defunct.”
Sources say that a draft law to regulate the lawyers’ profession is pending approval from the authorities concerned and if the government is serious about reviving the Association, it must incorporate into the proposed legislation provisions about how it could be funded.
The Association’s revival is necessary to make sure that it has the right to punish lawyers who are found violating the law that regulates their practice. “Otherwise, that right could be conferred on the justice ministry in the draft law , which is quite likely, according to sources.
In other countries, it is the Bar associations that have the above right, said the sources.
Among the major aims of the Association were to help improve the profession and professional ethics, regulate lawyers’ work and protect the rights of practising professionals.
The Peninsula
