The CC on Friday asked its members for compulsory presence in the meeting. The committee, which is entrusted with preparing a single integrated draft of the new constitution incorporating all the 11 preliminary draft reports prepared by the thematic committees, has asked parliamentary party leaders of all the 25 political parties in the CA to attend the meeting. [break]
Parliamentary party leaders of CPN (United), Nepal Workers and Peasants Party and Sadbhawana Party, who are not members of the committee, are also invited in the meeting. Parliamentary party leaders from other 22 parties and chiefs of major political parties are members of the committee.
The committee took the decision after it failed to move ahead without consulting top party leaders. As the CA is approaching its deadline to promulgate the new constitution and has forwarded only two of the 11 preliminary draft reports without resolving contentious issues, the CC is in fix surrounding the disagreements among the parties.
As per the ninth amendment of the CA schedule, the CC was supposed to prepare the integrated draft report by Friday. But, the CA, which is just 84 days away from the deadline to promulgate the new constitution, has forwarded only two preliminary draft reports so far.
"We decided to hold a meeting with all the parliamentary party leaders along with our members as our committee is going to be ineffective due to time constraints and large number of controversies yet to be resolved," CC Chairman Nilambar Acharya told myrepublica.com.
He said the CC is primarily entrusted with integrating the preliminary drafts into a single first draft report and not to resolve contentious issues. "The CA full House should have forwarded the reports to the CC after resolving the disputes. But it didn´t. How can the CC resolve the contentious issues that the CA full House and the thematic committees couldn´t?" he said.
So far the CA has forwarded the preliminary draft reports prepared by the Committee on Natural Resources, Financial Rights and Public Revenue Sharing and the Committee on Determining the Structure of the Constitutional Bodies. These two reports were forwarded as there was least number of contentious issues.
"But it didn´t help us prepare the integrated draft. We can make progress only after the CA forwards important reports like the ones on the system of governance, judicial system and the legislative bodies," Acharya said.
He said the CA has to either forward preliminary reports after resolving all the disputes to the CC or it has to entrust the CC with the mandate to resolve it and give the time accordingly.
"We [CC] decided over 95 issues through votes in a single day while preparing our thematic report. We can do so even while preparing the integrated draft. But we need mandate for that," he said.
Acharya says that the CC needs at least four weeks to prepare the integrated draft after it receives all the 11 preliminary drafts without disputes.
thira@myrepublica.com
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