A long delayed exercise to consult Zimbabweans on the drafting of the new constitution was launched by President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara last Wednesday. According to the Constitutional Parliamentary Committee (COPAC) leading the reforms, its teams will be deployed beginning tomorrow with meetings to here the views and ideas of the public on the new charter scheduled to start Wednesday. The outreach exercise runs until October.
In a joint statement to the media, the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) and the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) said they said they have deployed 420 monitors across the country to check on the COPAC teams.
The groups said: Our goal is to objectively monitor, observe and report on the work of COPA . in order to adjudge how democratic and transparent the constitution-making process is and if it accurately reflects the input of broad and diverse popular participation.
They said their monitoring teams would systematically gather information during the consultative process, comment on the political environment and any breaches to the GPA in relation to the process and to highlight any violations, violence or other discrepancies that occur in the constituencies and wards.
Civil society groups remain skeptical over the government-led constitutional reform exercise, while the national labour and student movements and the outspoken National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) political pressure group have vowed to campaign against the reforms that they say are open to abuse by the countrys three governing parties.
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