This Week in the Constituent Assembly

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly

The coordination committee, which compiles and reviews the drafts of all individual constitutional articles, has gone through almost all of the constitutional committees’ reports. Salma Bakkar, a Constituent Assembly (CA) member from the Democratic bloc, said that it will not be long until the first draft is ready to be discussed in the CA’s plenary session. “The first draft will be ready by October 23rd,” stated Bakkar.

According to Bakkar, who is also a member of the freedom and rights committee, the article concerning blasphemy was moved from the freedom and rights section of the Constitution to the preamble this week.

“The blasphemy clause wasn’t removed from the Constitution. It was moved from our section to Article IV of the preamble,” she confirmed.

On Tuesday, the preamble committee held a meeting to discuss changes that the coordination committee had sent them.

Sana Haddad, a CA member affiliated with the Ennahdha party, revealed that during that very meeting she and her colleagues made changes to the articles in the preamble regarding women and the family, the criminalization of relations with Israel, and the neutrality of religious establishments. “In the preamble committee, we discussed the structure of the article concerning women and family, and after the vote we decided to only keep the word women and omit family,” said Haddad.

Both Bakkar and Haddad confirmed that this week it was agreed to proceed with a semi-presidential political system in which the president and the parliament will be elected directly by the people.

This has been an eventful week given the release of a leaked video showing head of Ennahdha Rached Ghannouchi discussing his political strategies with a group of clerics. The CA will hold a plenary session to discuss the video among other issues, said Bakkar. The session will be held next Friday at 9 a.m.