In early September the Geneva-based UN-affiliated NGO, Interpeace, will launch a handbook of advice for emerging nations on how to go about the difficult process of creating a constitution. Constitution-making and Reform couldn’t have arrived at a better time with events in the Arab world moving as fast as they are.

 “Following the Arab Spring, we’re seeing that this is the age of constitution-making,” said Scott Weber, Director-General of Interpeace.  “There are more constitutions that are going to be revised or written in the next five years than in the previous twenty.”

 Interpeace’s role is not to dictate a template or even prescribe which constitutional system might be better than another.  The handbook is a compendium of advice from world-renowned experts and suggestions for how to go about the ‘process’ of constitution building.

 “We don’t promote any one system or political order,” said Weber. “It’s the process that makes or breaks a constitution.” The process includes getting factions together that may not agree with each other in order to find a common framework and reach a consensus. In this way, Interpeace believes, the process becomes locally owned and led and not imposed by outsiders. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

 “Whenever we see a country go through a very rapid constitution process it drives us nuts because the whole point is to get consensus.” Weber believes that after Mubarak, Egypt moved too quickly.

 In a forward to the handbook, Algerian-born, veteran UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi noted that sometimes a completely new constitution may not even be necessary. Looking back on his time as UN Special Representative to Afghanistan in 2004, for example, he observed, “I am strongly inclined to say that we might well have spared the people of Afghanistan and ourselves the effort” of trying build a new constitution. “The 1964 constitution, cleaned of its articles concerning the monarchy, could have served Afghanistan well for many years.”

 Asked what happens when a given society, such as Afghanistan, wishes to base its constitution on Sharia law, Weber responded, “This is tricky, but is it for us to decide? I would say not.”  He believes that the more that the constitution-writing process includes all groups of society, the more likely moderate solutions will be found.

 He notes that the process going on in Egypt may be based on Sharia law but there is a big push from moderates to keep Article Two of the previous constitution which protects other religions, such as the Christian Copts.

 The handbook will be available for free on the Internet for anyone who wants it, “Every President, every leader, heads of universities. We’re going to kids on the street and saying ‘instead of saying no to everything, come up with constitutional proposals and feed it through channels to others’… People will no longer be able to say ‘oh, we didn’t know how to go about this properly’.”