Venice Commission Delegation Visits Georgia

A delegation from Council of Europe’s (CoE) advisory body for legal and constitutional issues, Venice Commission, is visiting Tbilisi on February 3-4 to discuss ongoing constitutional reform within the state commission, which was established last June.

The delegation, led by Secretary of Venice Commission, Gianni Buquicchio, Council of Europe’s advisory body for legal and constitutional issues, med with President Saakashvili, Parliamentary Chairman Davit Bakradze and other officials, as well as representatives of commission on the constitutional reform.

“Your country needs a good constitution,” Gianni Buquicchio said earlier on February 4, before meeting with the representatives of the constitutional commission.

Constitutional amendments made after the Rose Revolution was “a progress, but it lacked balance between the powers,” he said and added that it was “the challenge” of drafters of the new constitution “to ensure real balance” between the branches of government.

“The government must be more accountable to the Parliament and the judiciary must be really independent,” he said. “The local self-governance must be reinforced and, if possible, new constitution should foresee kind of regionalism in order to give more autonomy to provinces.”

He also said that the delegation had a chance to view a chapter of the new constitution, which deals with the local self-governance. The current constitution, he continued, contains “very few, very general provisions” on the local government.

Jorgen Steen Sorensen, director of Danish public prosecutions and a member of the Venice Commission delegation said that they had not yet made any in-depth analysis of this chapter, but an initial observation was that although it was more extensive than the provisions currently contained in the constitution, but it’s “still quite general in its wording.”

He also said that one of the important suggestions from the Venice Commission would be to make the chapter on the local governance “more detailed” in order to provide a legal basis for solving possible disagreements between local and central governments in the future concerning such issues as financial and material resources and supervision of local governance.

The delegation said that the Venice Commission would probably submit its detailed opinion on this chapter of the draft constitution in early spring.

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