The Constituent Assembly of Nepal: An Agenda for Women - CAPWIP

International IDEA - The Constituent Assembly of Nepal: An Agenda for Womenknowledge and experience. They might be involved in hearing the views of the public. If they are constituencymembers, they will presumably visit their own constituency and hear the people's views. They may be involvedwith others, inside or outside the formal sessions of the Constituent Assembly, to put together concrete proposals,and would certainly be involved in discussing proposals put forward by others. They will, in the end, have to voteon the proposals.Some women may have a good understanding of what a constitution is and how it can help women. But somemembers may never have read a constitution before (never even seen one, perhaps). It will not be an attractive taskbecause constitutions are not exactly light reading matter, and apparently the Nepali style of legal drafting isparticularly arcane, but at an early stage delegates ought to get to grips with what a constitution is. If they really donot understand the contents of the constitution, it will be far harder for them to argue convincingly for a particularposition. One might break this task of understanding the contents down into three parts:• What does a constitution say?• What does it do?• How is it made to do what it says?A member will perhaps not get to grips with all of a constitution in any detail; most members will have some aspectsabout which they feel particularly strongly. But the less members understand, the more they will be subject to partydirection and other forms of pressure.A member ideally ought to be able to understand a written brief, at least on the areas that are of interest to him or her.A member must be prepared to listen-especially to arguments of the 'other side'.A member should be able to speak with some degree of confidence, at least in a committee. Maybe there will be fewopportunities to speak, for most members, in the full Constituent Assembly.Speaking confidently, so that people will listen is one thing, but if a person speaks irrelevantly and for too long,there will be little impact, and people will stop listening,Incidentally, there may be issues of integrity also. There may be circumstances in which members are underimproper pressure to vote in particular ways-in some countries, it has even happened that members havebeen bribed.14