The Constitutional Council

The process of constitutional rewriting in Iceland was an innovative transitional mechanism to introduce political and democratic reforms in response to the banking collapse. The aim was to involve the citizens in the making of a new constitution through a specially elected consultative Constitutional Assembly. Therefore, the political parties, whose credibility had suffered a major blow as a result of the crash, were excluded from the preparation and drafting stages of the new constitution. Their absence, however, was bound to affect the legitimacy of the process, because constitutional changes cannot be made without two consecutive parliamentary assemblies having approved them, with a general election taking place in-between. While the constitutional experiment has received considerable domestic and foreign attention, there has been no consensus on how to interpret it. Some scholars have characterized it as being “tremendously innovative and participatory.” ¹ Others, including many Icelandic political scientists and legal scholars, have expressed skepticism or criticism of the quality of the draft constitution and its proposal for a new political system, which many saw as complex and marked by a lack of consistency. ²