Day 2: Bad governance and good constitution – or?

It’s morning time in the Himalayas – a very cold morning as usual. As heat installation is not really common in Nepal most participants are just wearing jackets while listening to todays’ first lecturer Dr. Bhimrjun Acharya from the Supreme Court of Nepal.

Yesterday we started the day by having a lecture on political communication by Casper (he actually knows a thing or two about it…). Nepal’s youth are very frequent internet users, mainly near the cities, so they got new ideas of how to communicate by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging etc. One of the participants, Dinesh from Nepali Congress, has already used blogging with great success, both nationally and internationally.

A constitutional lawyer gave the participants an insight in the principles of the content of constitutions. Later on this was discussed from a more personal point of view by Buddki Karki, senior lawyer and team leader from UNDP. The current constitution drafting in Nepal will, sometime, result in the country’s 7th constitution in only 60 years. He said that the politicians want all people to be a part of this process, but that it will be really difficult to realize this as the people are never told how the constitution can effect their lives.  He claimed that a good governance/bad constitution is better than a bad governance/good constitution. As an example he mentioned Bhutan which, in his opinion, has the world’s most beautiful constitution. One could argue that Denmark works slightly better even though we have an extremely outdated constitution…

Buddki Karki argued that a constitution must be as simple as possible, so it won’t have to be updated all the time, so it doesn’t promise a lot that that won’t be realistic  and people therefore won’t trust it, and so that it leaves all the more specific decisions to the government. In Nepal the political parties all try to include as many specifications as possible, so it will probably end up becoming the biggest constitution in the world!  Just to give an example of the simplicity (or the lack of it ) in some constitutions; India mentions the word “health” 40 times in its constitution, whereas in the Danish, German and American constitutions it’s not even mentioned once.

Regarding the deadline on May 28 2010 for Nepal’s constitution, Buddki Karki thinks it’s going to be delayed at least six months. A lot is still to be done in the process; peoples’ opinions need to be collected, the draft revised, reaching an absolute majority in parliament or, as is very probable, a new revise of the draft an so on and so forth…

Christine and Christina gave a lecture on the Danish constitution. It was a bit complicated for everyone to understand the concept of having a King mentioned everywhere when he doesn’t have any power in reality and when we’re actually a democracy. It seemed quite interesting for the participants having an insight in the way we just choose to interpret our constitution in a modern context – and the fact that we’ve only had four amendments during 160 years.

After dinner we had a very informal – and challenging – reception. Challenging because all four Danes had to prove their not very confident dancing skills in front of all the brilliant Nepalese dancers. We have a really good video of Christine in action, but so far we’ll just keep it private so we always have the opportunity to blackmail her…

/Mette