Lorianne Updike Toler TRIPOLI – The Forum for Democratic Libya (FDL), with the support of the United Nations Development Program, has launched a national dialogue initiative to consult Libyan citizens on critical issues regarding the constitution. According to founder Amr Ben Halim, “The national initiative ‘I want… in My Constitution' is launched out of our belief that a constitution is not only a legal document but a social contract that includes, indiscriminately, all sectors of society.” Phases of the campaign include training dialogue facilitators, hosting public workshops to equip Libyans with skills and tools to participate in an informed manner, conducting 15 dialogue sessions across the country, documenting the process, and submitting the collected information to the constitution drafting commission (CDC). This project builds on many civil society initiatives such as the “manifesto” of Libyan Civil Society to Impact the Constitution, that of the New Libya Foundation and the embryonic “Constitution Network.” The manifesto and addendum, signed by a number of civil society organizations across Libya in September, recommends that public consultations “be recorded to ensure accuracy and integrity and public inputs should be analyzed, collated, and compiled into a report and presented to the Constitutional Committee for its consideration.” FDL seems to be well on its way to accomplishing the manifesto's challenge to record public consultations. At this stage, FDL has trained facilitators on its tools for citizens' voices to be recorded and has developed a thorough documentation process. Additionally, FDL will organize the dialogue sessions around several topics: forms of government (whether federal, central, parliamentary or presidential), the use of natural resources (specifically, oil proceeds), the role of women, the definition of equality and freedom, and minorities rights. Finally, FDL will also the media to reach all sectors of society and to engage it in this initiative during the consultation process as well as to hold the constitutional committee accountable to the people's will. The issue, however, of how their public consultations will be “analyzed, collated, compiled” in a format easily ingested by the CDC constitutes the next major step to be worked out by FDL. The problem of incorporation is of no small proportion. During the launch event, Eric Overvest, country director for UNDP in Libya, praised the South African public consultation campaign as a model Libya could learn from. Yet South Africa's campaign, though admirably successful in generating almost two million public submissions at a similar stage in their constitutional process, also generated doubts by South African civil society and the public at large that the expressed views could ever be seriously considered by the politicians writing the constitution. Libya can do better than South Africa. To help ensure that the praiseworthy work of FDL and others conducting similar public dialogue might not be wasted, the purpose of this article, the ninth in a series on constitutionalism and the fifth in a series on public participation, is to provide historical and comparative models for the mechanisms of incorporating public feedback into a constitution for bodies designing Libya's constitutional mechanisms. South Africa had a secretariat for their Constituent Assembly that processed the public submissions, later summarized by the technical working groups and thematic committees of the Constituent Assembly. The issue there, then, was not personnel, but the inconsistent and varied formats of the publics' submissions. FDL's plan to organise participation around themes will help with this problem, but not solve it entirely. Consideration will need to be given as to how, for instance, a topic like the definition of equality and freedom will map to human rights that might appear in a bill of rights. Will specific minorities receive individual textual attention, or will all Libyans be afforded the same kind of guarantees against discrimination in a manner that a court of law may apply in an even-handed manner? Such technical application from policy to constitutional text will require the assistance of those experienced in writing terse constitutional text. — Libya Herald
