The role and impact of the Constitutional Commission in preparing the constitutional revision

This chapter explores the objective of the establishment of the Constitutional Commission, why it came about, and how it performed its tasks. By mid-November 2010, when the National Forum was over, the full energy of the Constitutional Commission went into preparing the Constitutional Assembly which was to debate the substantive aspects of the constitutional revision. The Commission pointed out in its report that it was completely up to the Constitutional Assembly whether and, if so, how it intended to use these proposals or whether it ended up combining parts of each in the draft it would finally approve. The structure of the 2011 Proposal for a New Constitution largely followed the disposition of material proposed in the Constitutional Commission’s Report. The chapter describes how the decision to appoint a seven-person Constitutional Commission was taken only in the final stages of parliamentary discussion of the 90/2010 Act on a Constitutional Assembly; the idea had not been mooted previously.