(Santiago de Chile) The Chilean Congress has announced an agreement to start a new draft Constitution, three months after citizens rejected an initial proposal for change.
The two chambers of Parliament reached this agreement, convinced “that it is essential to allow a constituent process and to have a new Constitution for Chile”, indicates the text, presented Monday evening by the President of the Senate, Alvaro Elizalde , and that of the Chamber of Deputies, Vlado Mirosevic.
The agreement provides for the creation of a “Constitutional Council made up of 50 people whose sole objective will be to discuss and approve a proposed text for a new Constitution”.
These 50 members will be chosen in a ballot, with compulsory voting, in April 2023. The Council will be gender-balanced and the indigenous peoples will no longer have a quota of guaranteed seats, contrary to what happened during the previous attempt at reform.
Pending the appointment of this Council, a committee of 24 experts will be appointed by Parliament to draft a preliminary draft from January. These 24 experts will then join the Constitutional Council to submit a report in which they will be able to formulate proposals aimed at improving the draft constitution.
The Constitutional Council will begin work on May 21 and will have to submit its draft Constitution on October 21. A referendum will then be organized on 26 November.
A commission made up of 14 lawyers chosen by the Senate will also be formed to check whether the new standards are indeed admissible from a legal point of view.
The project will have to include 12 points supposed to form the “constitutional bases”, unlike the previous project which started from scratch.
Among these points are the recognition of Chile as a “Democratic Republic whose sovereignty resides in the people”, a recognition of the “indigenous peoples” and the recognition of the three powers: executive, bicameral legislative and judicial.
The Chileans had rejected by 62% on September 4 a proposal for a new constitution which aimed to replace that inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Despite several successive revisions, this text is considered to be a brake on any substantive social reform in Chile, the scene in 2019 of a violent popular uprising.
After the rejection by voters, the main political parties in the country had started negotiations to restart the constitutional process.