A sad ending
Editorial
In a well considered letter to this newspaper last week Mr Aubrey Collins, who is an advisor to the United Force in the parliamentary select committee on constitutional reform, made the point that the committee was moving at a snail's pace and he expressed doubt that it would do its job properly. He also raised the broader question of whether the National Assembly would be able to comply with the various deadlines fixed by the Herdmanston Accord. Mr Collins made the point that only four of the persons who had been in the Constitution Reform Commission were now in the Select Committee. The others, he suggested, did not seem to be fully briefed. Accordingly, some of the issues that had been dealt with by the Commission were being handled laboriously by the committee, particularly as many of the recommendations of the Commission were inconclusive and the committee members could not agree on what they meant. The absence of representation from civil society was also a disadvantage. Mr Collins asked if the committee would be required to make its own recommendations to the National Assembly when it had finished its work. Did it have time to do this properly, given the pace at which it had been proceeding? He noted that Dr Rupert Roopnaraine had proposed that for the purpose of considering and acting on the Commission's proposals the committee should consider itself to be the National Assembly but there was no agreement to this proposal. Mr Collins noted that the Commission had rushed to meet its deadline "at the cost of producing several half-baked recommendations which the select committee is finding it very difficult to decipher". Even if the committee completes its task by the stipulated deadline of 3lst October, l999 (and it is clear he believes this can only be done by rushing and doing a botched job) the "whole lot has to go to the full National Assembly. Heaven knows how long that will take, then it has to go to the legal draughtsmen", then be put in simple English by experts. Then the changes have to be put in a bill, debated and passed and then submitted to a referendum. Rushing to meet all these deadlines can easily turn the process of constitutional reform into a pappyshow, which it is already in danger of becoming. To avoid further rushing which severely affected the work of the Commission he suggests that the committee should concentrate on two issues, the electoral system and the composition and structure of the elections commission, and defer all the other issues to a later date. It is important to have a proper electoral system in place (Mr Collins clearly prefers a mixed P.R. system) and to have a well run election that "will be free and fair and seen to be so by all concerned". His argument is worth considering. The Commission did not produce the kind of work that was hoped for, indeed Mr Collins argues that it failed to address the basic issues raised by the Herdmanston Accord. If meeting deadlines becomes a virtue in itself, indeed the main objective, we may well end up with a botched constitution not noticeably better than the one imposed by fraud in l980.
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