Hi Mohammad
In broad terms I am with the HSE team on this one.
I don't know what any legislation in Bahrain may say but do understand that many projects in the Middle East generally follow EU, UK or US OSHA principles or a mix.
So, in the European Union (and UK before "Brexit") if it didn't say you have to do a risk assessment under any other Directive then the EC "Framework Directive" 89/391 comes into play - free download pdf in multiple languages.
In the UK that Directive is "transposed" via the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 in Great Britain with parallel regulations for Northern Ireland.
That Directive clearly puts the onus on the "employer" to do the risk assessment(s). The same happens with the "Management Regs" in Great Britain.
Assuming that people are employed by an organisation which has more than one person working for it, then the "employer" is the corporate body that employs in this case the engineers, the [reference removed] and others.
It is up to the "employer" to work out how to effectively delegate their responsibilities.
Now with the best will in the world, the [reference removed] don't know everything about everything and risk assessments are best led by those who understand the work processes to a greater extent that some HSE person who has probably never done most of the tasks that they get called on to help with risk assessments.
So, that means that the process is better led by those managing the task, with input from those actually DOING the task and ADVICE from the [reference removed].
How many signatures one might want on a piece of paper (or electronic equivalent) is a matter of corporate policy but in my view the HSE person should not be the one who "approves" risk assessment documentation.
However, there is a long history of managers being content to try and pass responsibility for H&S matters to some H&S bod, meaning the Managers can ignore the problem, but that is almost inevitably going to lead to conflict.
Suppose YOU as the HSE bod get the job of approving the risk assessment.......
YOU think and prescribe on the risk assessment that precautions A, B and C need to be put in place.
The Manager sees that if you do B, then production will be halved or the quality of work will be impacted
The Manager is assessed on things including production and quality.
Hence the Manager is much better placed to take on H&S as an integral part of the line management function.
Unless you work in an environment where there is some concept of Zero Harm and by inference Zero Risk, then one assumption is that there is a level of risk that needs to be tolerated - the question is how large that level can reasonably be, depending on the context, such that H&S issues do not repeatedly "STOP THE JOB" without good reason.
This is NOT some local issue unique to Bahrain. It happens across the Globe!