MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Iraq
SUNY-Albany arranged with an ICLAD consultant to serve in Iraq as a Senior Legislative Drafting Expert in Baghdad. In this capacity, she worked closely with the newly elected Transitional National Assembly as part of the Consortium on Electoral and Political Strengthening (CEPPS). With another ICLAD consultant, she implemented a learning program, beginning with a workshop. In this initial workshop, the ICLAD consultants worked with Iraqi facilitators who, in the course of helping the workshop participants to prepare bills and reports, also learned more about how to use law for democratic social change.
One of these ICLAD consultants went on to work on the Constitutional Law Advisory Project sponsored by NDI. This project arranged for constitutional law experts to meet with the constitutional drafting committee and provide them with information about other nations' constitutions, and their social impacts. A third ICLAD consultant spent six months in Baghdad as part of this project.
As the project progressed, a group of ICLAD Certified Trainers conducted a series of workshops on legislative problem-solving methodology in Baghdad, explaining the methodology's use for constitution making. ICLAD's approach to constitution making, first devised by ICLAD founder Bob Seidman when he drafted the Namibian constitution, was translated into Arabic and circulated among the Constitutional Committee members.
ICLAD's thirteen legal interns spent their summer internships compiling information for in-country consultants and members of Iraq's Constitutional Commission about the experiences other countries have had in dealing with common social problems, and about how social problems such as unemployment have been addressed in Iraq. ICLAD's interns also conducted research into the influence that various constitutional forms have had on the relationship of ethnic minorities, women, the poor and the military to their governments.
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