| Tuesday, July 19, 2005 |
11:25 - Iraqi Bill of Rights
http://www.publiuspundit.com/?p=1379
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InstaPundit points to this post by Robert Mayer, who has found what is apparently a leaked copy of a draft of the Iraqi equivalent of the Bill of Rights.
He has an analysis of the whole thing that brings up all the right crucial points (the right to bear arms, the role of Shari'a, the clauses prohibiting Israelis from becoming Iraqi citizens, the role of oil wealth being constitutionally redistributed into education); but he comes to an altogether too rosy conclusion on just about all of it, I'd say. Most of the commenters seem similarly skeptical, such as Ryan Waxx, whose sentiments seem representative:
That ‘in accordance with law’ crap makes the whole constitution meaningless. The entire POINT of a bill of rights is to put certain matters above the normal reach of government. Without striking that language, that will shorten the useful life of the government being formed by a large factor. But it isn’t as bad as the EU ‘constitution’, whose bill of rights are a laundry list of social services.
What with all these constitutions being written lately, there's a great opportunity for students of law and history to see concrete examples of how different political traditions develop different forms of government, and how certain weaknesses appear in them. Here we have as strong a demonstration as any of the fundamental difference between the U.S. Bill of Rights—with its absolute and injunctive language—and what other constitutional authors always seem to go for, which amounts to "grants" from the government for people to have certain privileges "in accordance with law". One can draw a pretty interesting spectral graph and place different constitutions along it with regard to their stance on inalienable human rights; whether it's Canada's assertion that every citizen "has" the right to free speech and the like (whatever that means when such rights are threatened), or the Iraqis' deferring the definition of "rights" to whatever the legislature should decide, it ought to be fairly clear that there's a significant difference in philosophy between these traditions and a supreme authority that says Congress shall make no law....
It's instructive, at the very least, to note how few democracies there are in the world that have adopted language like ours. Do most societies not have the stomach for such extremity? Or are we just that far out on a limb, even still, historically speaking?
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Brian Tiemann
