Consciousness - Raising Birth pains

NST Online, 2010/01/31, By Aniza Damis.

It’s easy to take apart a Constitution, but how do you put one together from scratch? And how do you arrive at a document that’s fair to all? ANIZA DAMIS attends a MyConstitution workshop and observes the laborious process of “birth”

IF you had the world to do over again, what would you do differently? Who would you choose as citizens of your new world? And who would you turn down? What rights would these citizens have? And how protected would these rights be? And if you could draft a new constitution, how would it read? These, and more, were what some Law students at Taylor’s University College had to grapple with at a recent MyConstitution workshop.

Entitled Reconstituting Earth v.2.0, the students are told the following: Earth is going to be destroyed soon, and everyone on it will die. But a planet has been identified, “which looks like Earth and sounds like Earth, but we’re not sure if it will be like Earth”. An auto-pilot spaceship has been made, but it can only fit six people. Assuming that the new planet (Earth v.2.0) has no one living on it, a new world order has to be created.

The six people cannot bring anything but themselves to the planet.

Working in groups of eight, the students have to choose six from a list of 25 people of different identities and skills to be the ones to go to Earth v.2.0. The decision for each choice must be unanimous.

“The first module is to challenge the assumptions and stereotyping that we normally have in society — the prejudice and bias against homosexuality, religion, genderdiscrimination and marginalised communities such as the Orang Asli, for instance,” says Bar Council Constitutional Law Committee (ConstiLC) chairperson Edmund Bon.

Edmund Bon (left) briefing the participants.

The workshop is one component of the ConstiLC’s MyConstitution Campaign, which aims to create awareness of the Federal Constitution and constitutionalism.

Before the workshop, Taylor’s deputy vice chancellor Pradeep Nair launched the Taylor’s chapter of the campaign, and gave out 3,000 of the MyConstitution campaign’s Rakyat Guides booklets to deans and heads of its faculties and departments.

“The aim of the module was not to try and change the assumptions or stereotypes or biases that they grew up with. It’s just to prompt them to question whether their assumptions or stereotypes were something which is necessary or feasible or good for society,” says Bon.

The 60 students who took part certainly challenged themselves and their group-mates. Because each choice had to be unanimous, debates on the worthiness of each selection were robust and vociferous.

With one group, for instance, disagreement among all the members was so strong that voices were constantly raised, with members standing up and sitting down in frustration. All they could agree on was that they didn’t agree! What groups chose largely depended on whether survival was the imperative criteria. If it was, then the choices leaned towards a selection which had either a proven fertility (such as the mother with two children and the pregnant actress) and the skill to feed (the fisherman and farmer) or keep people alive (the sinseh and Western lesbian nurse).

An old philosopher and motivator, for instance, did not make the cut because it was expected he would die sooner than a young person. And the classical dancer and musician wasn’t chosen either, because that skill was not needed for survival. Most groups also did not choose the unskilled Orang Asli leader because he was thought to have no skills.

“Your world will have no music, dance or storybooks. My goodness — what a world!” says Bon to the groups who excluded the musician, dancer and author of children’s books.

“Knowledge becomes extinct in a world with no philosopher. You diminish the ethnic pool if you don’t have an Orang Asli.” And while some groups did not look at ethnicity when choosing people for their skills, some did pay attention to it — so as to maintain ethnic diversity in their new world.

One common choice of exclusion, however, was of the religious teacher.

“Which religion?” all groups asked.

“Religion might be divisive” and “Religion only creates war” were reasons given by all to exclude the religious teacher in favour of the spiritual one.

At the end of the first module, Bon says, “Ask yourselves why you chose these people: Do we only value people based only on what they can give us? Don’t look at people just as tools towards an end.” In the second module, some years have passed. Earth v.2.0 has 500 inhabitants and the society is threatened by tyranny.

Therefore, it has to come up with a guide book on how to live and create a government. The groups have to come up with a list of rights and a preamble to a constitution.

This time, the discussion noise-level was louder.

Should rights be absolute? For instance, should an absolute right to life preclude judicial killings? “We only have 500 people — we can’t afford for anymore to die!” was one impassioned argument against the death penalty.

In preparing their preamble, all groups focused on how society should be run, and how to select or elect the right people to be leaders, as well as what transgressions society had to guard against. For instance, how should the Constitution be amended? All groups chose referendum and took the power to amend away from Parliament.

“The Constitution is supreme, so Parliament has no right to override it,” said one participant. “The power is in the hands of the people — everything must be by referendum.” Bon says: “In this module, the groups had to decide what kind of society they wanted. All came back with Rule of Law and how to achieve justice.

“And, in their list of human rights, many of them were the same as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — and some went beyond the UDHR. This debunks the idea that the UDHR only contains Western values and rights.” Taylor’s Law School dean Rajeswari Kanniah says: “They learned in a fun and relaxed way what an important document the Constitution is and how it affects their lives in many ways.

“They also learned that crafting a Constitution is no easy task and there has to be a balancing exercise to cater for many competing interests.” In wrapping up the workshop, MyConstitution facilitators Leong Yeng Kong and Mahaletchumi Balakrishnan cautioned participants against taking a good Constitution for granted.

“A country with a beautiful Constitution can exist in anarchy. After we have drafted a Constitution, how do we keep it alive? How do we make sure it doesn’t devolve or fall into disrepute?” asks Leong.

“When you talk about ‘my Constitution’, don’t just talk about what it can do for you.

You have to protect it. How will you defend your Constitution? Think about that,” says Mahaletchumi.

anizad@nst.com.my