Wanted: A constituent, representative assembly

On May 10 the President will present to Parliament the government's programme for the coming legislature. What do you most hope to find in it?

What I hope is not necessarily what I expect. For a long time I have been hoping that there will be something like a constituent assembly summoned not to revise the Constitution here and there in bits and pieces but to redraft it from scratch. This does not of course mean that the 1964 Constitution was not an excellent piece of work at that time. It means that since then the world has changed and in more than half a century the Maltese are bound to have learnt something useful.

Judge Giovanni Bonello had published proposals before the change of government in 1987 that have never been, as far as I know, seriously discussed, let alone implemented, and in my view they were more like important tinkering than radical changes.

He did not consider issues such as whether it might not make more sense to shift to a really presidential form of government rather than merely have a republican substitute for a symbolic monarch.

He had, however, made some proposals which would have given the President more instances in which he could act. The Today Think-Tank expressed a similar thought, when it suggested that for appointments which should be agreed upon by the government and opposition, but are not; the President is asked to arbitrate.

There has been no serious discussion either as to whether there is scope for a second chamber. Obviously, such a chamber should not be a senate elected by privileged voters as Malta once had, but a body where members could also be elected according to universal suffrage. This would not be on the basis of where you have your official residence - something that is no longer as important as it used to be - but according to other more significant criteria such as work, age or gender.

In such a chamber women would be as numerous as their proportion of the population justified, and so would young people. There might also be the possibility of 'wise men', such as former presidents or former chief justices having a forum through which they could still contribute formally to the governance of the nation. It might also serve to allow non-party technical experts to be included in the Cabinet if my preferred alternative of separating the executive from the legislative, in the manner of the US, were not to be favoured by the constituent assembly.

You have spoken of something like a constituent assembly. How would you, in fact, set going the process of adopting a new Constitution?

My suggestion would be that Parliament should set up a consultative body in which the whole of civil society would participate, as well as any others who might be expected to have something useful to contribute, and for them to submit drafts for discussion. A number of alternative proposals could then be formulated by qualified redactors, for submission to a referendum.

I have myself alas had the experience of participating in the composition of a Constitution proposed for the European Union that was torpedoed mainly by the referendums in France and Holland. Also, practically the whole of it has been savaged in treaty form.

The iceberg that led to the sinking of this enterprise that was presented to the world by its president with the same sort of fanfare as the launching of the Titanic was the questionable nature of the entity for which a Constitution was being written. Was the EU a federal state even if as yet in embryonic form or was it rather, as I think, a network emerging as a new species of political animal, destined never quite to become a federal state?

There is clearly no such problem confronting us, although a major reason for calling a constituent assembly is that we are now a member of the European Union and not a British colony being promoted to statehood by the UK Parliament.

Apart from such controversial ideas as a presidential regime, a second chamber and a Cabinet not necessarily made up of parliamentarians, are there any other Constitutional provisions that you deem to be perhaps more urgent and upon which consensus might be more readily reached?

The Prime Minister has himself mentioned the urgency of revising the Constitutional regulation of the electoral process at least to avoid the result that would have occurred in the last election had a member of a third party been elected. We would have had a Labour government with a majority of seats and minority of votes.

This prospect may indeed have been an important factor that kept voters from voting for third party candidates. Some even quizzed each other about what would have been the case if, say, Harry Vassallo had been elected in a by-election.

However, I hope the Prime Minister does not intend to restrict constitutional review to just this issue. A Freedom of Information Act has also been announced but it is not only ordinary legislation that requires reform in the new Information age. There is also, for instance, section 41 of the Constitution.

The actual German Basic Law has established a fundamental right to personal dignity and development, the application of which the German Constitutional court has extended such matters as 'freedom from on-line surveillance'.

Besides, the freedom of access to public documents - that has been promised although not at a constitutional level - needs to be accompanied by a revision of media regulation in the age of the internet.

The whole matter of human rights in the Constitution calls for consideration, particularly in light of the Charter of Human Rights adopted by the European Union.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.