Thursday, August 04, 2005

Iraqi Constitution Update

Iraq the Model blogged It was expected that the suggested draft of the constitution which I posted several day ago would fuel arguments and serious discussions in the corridors of the National Assembly and the government and from what I heard and read in local media and from some information that leaked from some politicians, I learned that some of the upsetting articles of the draft have been changed or omitted while some other articles are still being discussed. And regarding the most critical issue which is defining the role of religion in the constitution, there's also a good possibility for changing the part that said "2-Islam is the official religion of the state and it is the main source of legislations…" to something like "Islam is …..and it's a main source of legislations" or "…is one of the sources of legislations" and either way is going to somehow protect the rights of women and human rights in general and at the same time satisfy the demands of religious parties and frankly speaking I don't think it's possible at the moment to have no mention of Islam in the constitution.

It would be good if you could include something like Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof but you dont want to let some future bunch of judges to deciding that means the government has to work to root out all connections to Islam
Another controversial point was the distribution of revenues of important resources (mainly oil money) among the federal counties (or provinces) and the central state and apparently they have settled on a resolution that assigns 90% of these incomes to the central state while the remaining 10% would go directly to the province to be invested by the local authorities in projects that focus mainly on the infra structure or according to the needs of the province.
Sounds like our congress. Wants the bulk of the money to spend as it wants, and to heck with what the states [provinces] think

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