This is a continuation of my previous post; Our society needs a new constitution
In that post, the constitution committee had met and planned how we were going to undertake the whole project of the constitution drafting process.
Summary
If you didn’t see my last post, this is a summary of it for you to get on track.
So I am the chairman of the judiciary board of the computer science society of my university campus. Our campus just transitioned from being a part of a larger university to standing on its own. Because of that, all documents in our university now has to be changed to reflect the objectives of the new university, including constitutions and all other legal and/or official documents. In the last post I made about this, I as the chairperson of the judiciary board put together a constitution committee and we met and planned the whole project including our meeting times and frequency.
This post will bring you along to my departments constitution drafting process. You’re reading this story from the point of view of the leader of the process. I’m tired of mentioning my title.
Our first meeting where we actually started drafting the constitution was on Wednesday 22nd February.
We developed a plan that would make our work very easy. Since there is already an old constitution, we just needed to change some things in it and not everything. So what we did was, we converted the old constitution which was in a pdf format into a word document format, let our secretary opened it up on her PC, then we went through it while changing those things that needs to be changed. These changes are made to conform to the main constitution governing the general student-body of the school, called the SRC constitution. Meaning of SRC in the previous post. As we are only a department under the school. The SRC constitution was also drafted to conform to the constitution governing the country (the constitution of the republic of Ghana).
It sounds really easier than it actually is. Changing constitutional instruments is no easy task. I’m talking about our code of conduct as a department/society. These are the rules and regulations guiding and governing us as a society. This document covers every aspect concerning students life on the campus. Being a 7-member committee is definitely helping even though only 5 of us showed up.
Enough of the background story.
Long story short, we got to a particular constitutional instrument and it proved so difficult that we had to stop at that particular place and close the meeting.
It was the article of the constitution that talks about the General Assembly. The thing is, this old constitution of our department that we are making a new one out of, was made to conform with the old constitution of the school. But the school has a new constitution now, and many things are different in it including the General Assembly.
UDS constitution GA, old school constitution
UDS CSS constitution GA, old society constitution
CKT UTAS constitution parliamentary council, new school constitution
In our new school constitution, we don’t use General Assembly anymore we rather use parliamentary council instead.
The problem was the composition of the Parliamentary Council because a parliament is supposed to have members of parliament and we have that at the school level but when it comes to the department level we don’t have any sort of thing like that. And it’ll cost us more than we can afford to have parliamentarians at the department level. So we went back and forth discussing the different ideas the members were contributing but we weren’t really moving anywhere. So we resolved that each one of us should go back to their hostels and sleep on it and come back at our next meeting and tell the committee about their new ideas. We also concluded that while we as members of the constitution draft committee thinking about the matter, we would also make consultations with the school level judiciary board to give us a guideline as to how to go about that particular instrument to conform to the constitution of the school as they are the master interpreters of the constitution by regulation.
Judiciary board has the final interpretation of the constitution as they as the custodians of the law. As we are also writing this particular constitution as a department level judiciary board we would be the custodians of the law at the department level.
On Thursday 23rd February we met the school level judiciary board in a meeting they had called to meet all leadership of judiciary boards of all junior common rooms(JCRs), clubs and associations/departments/societies.
We put our issue before them and they said to give them until 1st March to revert to us with their final decision on that matter.
We have gone ahead to work on the other parts of the constitution while we wait for the SRC Judiciary Council’s conclusions on that issue.
Old school constitution
New school constitution
