By Libya Herald staff.
Tripoli, 28 August 2014:
The President of the Constitutional Drafting Committee, Ali Tarhouni, has been to Tunisia . . .[restrict]to meet with the parties involved in developing the country’s own post-revolutionary constitution.
Tarhouni has said it is his hope he and his Libyan colleagues will be able to “benefit from the Tunisian experience,” the Libyan News Agency LANA reported. He added that a successful constitution in Libya would have a positive impact on the region as a whole.
Tarhouni met with the President of Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly, Mustafa Bin Jafar, who said Tunisia was willing to provide “every necessary assistance to Libya”.
The Libyan delegates are to look at the ways their counterparts were able to draw on different aspects of civil society and respond to the aspirations of the Tunisian people in the framing of their constitution. They will address the various principles and methodologies in the Tunisian document.
The delegates also met with the leaders of Tunsian Muslim Brotherhood’s Ennahda Party, the Tunisian equivalent of the Justice and Construction Party. Ennahda won Tunisia’s first legislative elections in 2011 but was forced to step down from power in January.
Tunisia’s journey to a new constitution has been much longer than expected. A constituent assembly was elected on 23 October 2011 and was supposed to come up with a new constitution within a year. Despite the involvement of lawyers and other experts it took over two years. The constitution was finally adopted in January this year and elections for a new president and parliament are due to take place in two months’ time, on 26 October.
Yesterday’s UN Security Council resolution called on Libya’s Constitutional Drafting Committee to “carry out their tasks in a spirit of inclusiveness”.
The committee has been meeting in the eastern town of Beida since April. It has stated at several intervals that it has been making steady progress with drafting of the constitution but it is clear that, like the Tunisian Constituent Assembly, it will take much longer to draw it up than anticipated. It was originally envisaged that it would complete its work by the end of last month.
The end of the year, at the earliest, is now seen as a more realistic date.
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