determinant of the importance of an issue enough to find its way into the Draft Constitution
that has been produced.
16. Preparatory work for drafting
Some of the issues that were raised during the outreach programme were not necessarily
constitutional. The Select Committee then undertook an exercise of extracting constitutional
issues from the National Statistical Reports. In this regard COPAC engaged 17 legal experts
(5 per political party and 2 representatives of Chiefs).
The Select Committee met at various locations which include Pandhari, Masvingo, Vumba
and Bulawayo and engaged in the following processes:
1) The extraction of Constitutional issues, all of them, as derived from the outreach
process. These are contained in a document entitled ‘Drafting Instruments’ which is
also attached for the information of this Honourable House.
2) The second exercise was to extract, from the list of constitutional issues, the list of
Agreed Constitutional issues that would actually go into the constitution These are
also contained in the document entitled ‘Drafting Instruments’ noted above.
3) The Select Committee also developed 26 Constitutional Principles from the National
Statistical Report to guide the drafting process. These are also contained in the
document entitled ‘Drafting Instruments’ noted above.
4) There were gaps in the information that was collected during the outreach
programme. In some instances technical questions were not addressed. People
answered the question “what”, and did not address the question of “how” they wanted
the issues to be effected in the constitution. The Select Committee with the assistance
of technical experts then conducted a process of identifying and filling the gaps and
produced an agreed Document on Gap Filling. Some of the gaps identified were in
respect of the following areas:
17
•
Qualifications of judges
•
Removal of judges from office
•
Who can declare a state of emergency
•
Acquisition, loss and restoration of citizenship
•
Powers of the Senate and the House of Assembly
•
Election of President of the Senate
•
Election of Speaker of the House of Assembly
•
General matters relating to parliament
The Constitution Select Committee (COPAC) Report to Parliament, February 2013
Select target paragraph3
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