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FACTS AND SITES. MARTÍ CRESPO. NEW

marti.crespo@partal.cat

We the people

Constitute provides precise and up-to-date access to constitutions from around the world

It is not com­mon for peo­ple to read con­sti­tu­tions. It is only in ex­cep­tional sit­u­a­tions, such as that of Cat­alo­nia at pre­sent, that any con­sul­ta­tion goes be­yond the strictly ju­ridic in­ter­pre­ta­tion and nor­mal, the wider con­tents are not stud­ied by most peo­ple. Cat­alo­nia's sov­er­eign process how­ever, has sparked in­ter­est in study­ing the Span­ish and other con­sti­tu­tions and been used in the de­vel­op­ment of con­sti­tu­tional pro­pos­als for a pos­si­ble in­de­pen­dent Cat­alo­nia of the fu­tire. It is here where “Con­sti­tute” be­comes an ex­tremely use­ful tool.

Con­sti­tute was set up in 2013 thanks to the Com­par­a­tive Con­sti­tu­tions Pro­ject and with fund­ing from Google and the In­digo Trust, and is a web por­tal which con­tains the con­sti­tu­tions of nearly two hun­dred coun­tries, all ap­pro­pri­ately clas­si­fied, la­belled and trans­lated into Eng­lish (and from De­cem­ber some also in Ara­bic). The basic ob­jec­tive is to pro­vide cit­i­zens with ac­cess to all con­sti­tu­tions and help those na­tions that are in the process of con­sti­tu­tional re­view. The web­site states: “New con­sti­tu­tions are writ­ten every year. The peo­ple who write these im­por­tant doc­u­ments need to read and analyse texts from other places. Con­sti­tute of­fers ac­cess to the world's con­sti­tu­tions that users can sys­tem­at­i­cally com­pare them across a broad set of top­ics — using an invit­ing, clean in­ter­face.”

In ad­di­tion to find­ing com­plete and up to date ver­sions (HTML and PDF), the great ad­van­tage is that users can also sys­tem­at­i­cally com­pare the hun­dreds of top­ics and subtopics or sim­ply search for key words and con­cepts. The au­thors say the tool has been used in con­sti­tu­tional drafts for coun­tries such as Libya, Myan­mar and Nepal. How­ever, one out­stand­ing as­pect is that not only leg­is­la­tors and ju­rists have ac­cess. Any­one at all can eas­ily dis­cover that the phrase “We, the peo­ple” that opens the United States, is also used in some 50 other magna car­tas; that there is only one con­sti­tu­tion in the world, the Bo­li­vian, which guar­an­tees the rights of na­ture (Pachamama), or, as high­lighted on the home page, there is a di­rect and ex­plicit ref­er­ence to the cases of Cat­alo­nia and Scot­land and that there are twenty-two con­sti­tu­tional texts in the world with pro­vi­sions re­lat­ing to the se­ces­sion of a ter­ri­tory. For Cata­lan users there is also an­other point of in­ter­est. By sim­ply using Google Docs, any group of peo­ple in­ter­ested in putting to­gether the frame­work of a pos­si­ble con­sti­tu­tion can eas­ily se­lect mul­ti­ple items and pieces they like from other con­sti­tu­tions and ex­port them to this of­fice tool for col­lab­o­ra­tive man­age­ment. In 2010, the Ice­landic peo­ple who worked col­lec­tively to re­form their con­sti­tu­tion were not able to take ad­van­tage of this op­tion. In 2015, Cata­lans will find this tool to be fully at their ser­vice.


Lawyer Amadeu Abril [blocs.​mesvilaweb.​cat/​amadeu] re­called a few weeks ago on his blog the day, ten years ago, that ICANN [www.​icann.​org] ap­proved the .cat [do­mini.cat] and with it, the world's first lin­guis­tic and cul­tural In­ter­net do­main. Shortly be­fore­hand, the Scot­tish gov­ern­ment had in­au­gu­rated the do­main gov.​scot [www.​gov.​scot], which from then al­lowed In­ter­net users to ac­cess in­for­ma­tion from the ad­min­is­tra­tion in­stead of hav­ing to use the for­mer Scot­land.gov.​uk [www.​scotland.​gov.​uk].

Now, a decade after the ap­pear­ance of the .cat do­main, other cul­tural com­mu­ni­ties around the world have fol­lowed the move and de­clared their dig­i­tal in­de­pen­dence. The Basque [www.​ejgv.​euskadi.​eus] and Gali­cian [www.​xunta.​gal] gov­ern­ments, for ex­am­ple, have also adopted the for­mat for their re­spec­tive cul­tural com­mu­ni­ties, (.eus, .gal) and at the end of the year, web­sites of the re­gions of Al­sace [www.​region.​alsace] and Brit­tany [www.​bretagne.​bzh], will be ac­cessed with the spe­cific do­mains and .al­sace and .bzh, al­though in the lat­ter, the user is redi­rected to the page with the .fr do­main. The por­tal of the Welsh par­lia­ment [www.​assembly.​wales], mean­while, is also ac­tive with the Welsh cul­tural and lin­guis­tic com­mu­nity do­main, .wales, but the Welsh ver­sion, .cymru, is not yet work­ing. On the other side of the At­lantic, the gov­ern­ment of Que­bec [www.​gouv.​quebec] is now ac­ces­si­ble­with the do­main .que­bec, al­though redi­rected to the URL with Cana­dian end­ing. Fi­nally, the do­mains of the Flem­ish and Ty­rolean cul­tural com­mu­ni­ties .vlaen­deren [www.​nic.​vlaanderen] and .tirol [www.​nic.​tirol] are still in process.

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