The Tunisian Constituent Assembly's By-laws: A Brief Analysis

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Mar 16, 2013 Tunisia
[Tunisian Chamber of Deputies, meeting place of the NCA. Image by Coyau via Wikimedia Commons] [Tunisian Chamber of Deputies, meeting place of the NCA. Image by Coyau via Wikimedia Commons]

The Tunisian Constituent Assembly's By-laws: A Brief Analysis

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance on 26 February 2013.]

The Tunisian Constituent Assembly`s By-laws: A Brief Analysis

Executive Summary

In response to the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia is in the process of  developing a new constitution. The institution charged with drafting this new constitution is the National Constituent Assembly (NCA). The functioning and processes of  the NCA will directly affect the shape of  the new constitution and, as a result, its response to the revolutionary demands and the democratic functioning of  the state. This study describes and analyses the NCA’s rules of  procedure and identifies areas of concern and difficulties that arise in its application.

Most parliamentary rules anywhere in the world will reveal certain weak points. It is therefore no surprise that there are indeed a number of  potential weaknesses in the NCA’s rules of  procedure that could lead to unnecessary political conflict or impasse, as discussed below. However, perhaps the most critical weaknesses are those that relate to textual ambiguity and a lack of  implementation.

Many individual members of the NCA and outside observers have a multitude of complaints about the Assembly’s modus operandi. These criticisms are widely aired in the media, and in the electronic media in particular. There are repeated complaints about the organization’s failure to publish the agendas and minutes of Assembly proceedings, and particularly those of its committees. These are complaints about the implementation of the rules of procedure, and not about the rules themselves. Instances in which a failure in implementation results in a lack of transparency are particularly worrisome, especially when the constitutional drafting process is primarily political, as is explained below. Transparency puts political pressure on the political process to help achieve improved outcomes.

The other major broad weakness relates to ambiguity. Too much is left to chance, to unspoken rules and to informal interparty deals. What the British call the ‘usual channels’ work reasonably well most (but by no means all) of the time in institutions of great longevity in which custom carries more or less the same authority as written rules. Such informal practices are less reliable, and much more prone to abuse (or simple failure) in newly forged institutions in which there is little continuity of membership or shared experience to enforce their legitimacy. If Tunisia’s NCA fails in its principal task of creating a workable constitution, it will be a political failure rather than the result of  inadequate internal rules.

In the light of these two broad concerns, as well as criticisms that relate to the functioning of specific processes within the NCA, the authors make the following suggestions for any future revision of  the rules:

  1. provide the president of the Assembly with a clearly graded series of sanctions, backed by the ability to appeal immediately to the whole Assembly for support, by a formal vote if  necessary;
  2. reconsider the procedures for legislative initiative and control of the agenda in order to clarify the different procedures available to the government and members of  the Assembly, to establish a better balance between them;
  3. explore the possibility of adding a time limit for the president of the Assembly to transmit draft laws to committee;
  4. consider adding procedures for examining legislative proposals in committee;
  5. consider adding procedures for examining legislative proposals in plenary Assembly;
  6. consider introducing a rule that would allow the government to set a date by which a committee must submit its report on a proposed legislative text;
  7. consider adding an automatic mechanism to ensure that proposed amendments are discussed;
  8. elaborate and clarify the chair’s powers to enforce discipline and maintain order;
  9. clarify the acceptable scope of points of order (and the manner in which they can be raised) and codify the nature of  procedural motions from the floor and the procedure for their consideration;
  10. consider introducing a procedure for challenging a ruling from the chair on grounds of incompatibility; and
  11. explore the possibility of providing opportunities for non-government parties to initiate debate, either in committee or in plenary Assembly, and have some influence over the agenda.

[Click here to download the full report.] 
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412